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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25265308">Kid Win's Big Break</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nihilistic_Janitor/pseuds/Nihilistic_Janitor'>Nihilistic_Janitor</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Parahumans Series - Wildbow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, For Want of a Nail</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 05:27:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>25,800</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25265308</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nihilistic_Janitor/pseuds/Nihilistic_Janitor</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kid Win requests a transfer to a dangerous quarantine zone to atone for not fighting Leviathan.</p><p>Note: this fic is completely abandoned, and will not be updating any more. I'm only uploading it here at the request of people who wanted to read it on this site instead. If you decide you want to take a crack at continuing it or something, feel free.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The city was gone. Washed away. A sandcastle of steel and concrete, now half-sunk into the bay. Buildings had crumbled. Bodies were in the streets. Glass was shattered. Power was gone. People huddled in camps, hiding from the devastation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The city was gone, and I hadn’t fought.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dean had gone. Smiling, kind, caring Dean. Carlos had gone. Grinning, tough, brave Carlos. Both were dead. I still had Carlos’ copy of </span>
  <em>
    <span>Fragile Things</span>
  </em>
  <span>. It almost hurt to look at, now, because Carlos had been anything but fragile, and he still had died.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Worst of all, I couldn’t even say that I would have made a difference. I had a hoverboard. Cool. And a laser pistol. Pew. And a cannon that would have gotten smashed to bits before I’d even fired it. What a difference I would have made, out there, fighting that natural disaster in shiny, dumb armor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kid Win. Even to my friends, it was a joke of a name. I don’t win. I never win. I built dumb crap, and I get the crap kicked out of me, and that was it. Kid Win. God, if I could only go back and tell younger me that it was a terrible name. That I’d never be a Hero. That Hero had died, and he was a Tinker worlds better than me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sloshed my way through the streets on the way to the PRT headquarters. I was wearing giant yellow rain boots. My parents had insisted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That was the other thing that rankled. Kid Win was a joke name, and even my parents knew it. My parents had kept me home because they knew I wouldn’t make a difference. And I couldn’t even say they were wrong. I couldn’t even resent them for it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I passed the broken-down remains of the bookstore that Carlos had loved so much. The books inside were probably ruined. The shelves had collapsed. There were inches of water on the floor. Creased Spine Books was no more. There wouldn’t be any more outings. No more of Carlos peering at the sci-fi shelves, trying to find a copy of something he had heard about online. No more of Missy angrily grabbing a stepping stool to reach the top shelf of the Young Adult novels. No more of Dennis happily grabbing another Animorphs book.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The elevator at the PRT headquarters still worked. That was something, at least.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wanted to get some tinkering done. Maybe talk to Armsmaster, see if I could come up with some better ideas that I could actually build. I wanted to do something, anything really, so long as it meant I could stop feeling for a little while. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>My little makeshift Tinker workshop was a mess. There were parts and papers and tools all scattered about at total random. I took five minutes to stare at it. Then I turned around and went to go find Armsmaster. I didn’t want to deal with that mess for a little while.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Someone was crying, in their room. I thought it might be Missy. I kept walking. It wasn’t my business what other people were going through. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Dean had always handled that sort of thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster was in his workshop. I knocked. Armsmaster gave a gruff, “Come in.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was sitting at his desk, hands folded under his chin, contemplating a Dragon armband in front of him. A halberd was out of its usual rack for weapons, instead leaning crookedly against his desk. There were bags under his eyes. There was a cup of coffee on his desk.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I stood in the doorway. “I wanted to go over some ideas with you, if that’s okay,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He pulled up a chair for me to sit in. We talked. We talked Tinker business, so I could turn my mind off for a bit and just let my brain do the talking. I jumped from idea to idea with reckless abandon, scribbling down notes and making wild postulations and gesturing with my hands. It was freeing, getting a chance to talk about something other than the sorry state of Brockton Bay.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster, though? He was curt. Short and sharp with his remarks. He could focus in a way I couldn’t, rip away useless fodder from a workable idea, keep things simple for stupid me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was worse than usual, though. He seemed unsure, unsettled. He didn’t even smile when I cracked a joke, he didn’t seem willing to really commit to any of my designs, even his focus felt shaky. If I said anything while he was thinking, he would lose the thought entirely.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I couldn’t blame him. He’d almost died.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Finally, though, my grasshopper of an attention span leapt to the Dragon armband on his desk, and Armsmaster didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he rubbed his temples. Then he said, “It’s nothing.” Then I wrapped up my visit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I had an armful of ideas to try out today. But prime among them all was what I had seen of Armsmaster himself. Armsmaster was an amazing Tinker. He was one of the top heroes in the whole Protectorate. He was a Tinker anyone could look up to. And I got to work with him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But even he had almost died. Hero had died. Sphere...nobody talked about what happened to poor Sphere. When I got back to my workshop, instead of trying to build something, I went online to think.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Prominence, disappeared, presumed dead. Thopter, defected to the Toybox, killed by a parahuman robber gang. Simplicity, dead, burned alive from inside by Behemoth. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So many Tinkers. Tinkers better than I was. Tinkers who knew their specialties, their abilities, who built like people possessed. So many grisly ends.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My friends were dead. My city was ruined. And the only thing that saved me was cowardice. I couldn’t build like other Tinkers. I couldn’t devote myself to Tinkering the way they did. My designs slipped away from me, my tech proved itself next to worthless time and time again. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kid Win was a joke name.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then I came across the Wikipedia page on Barlow. An underwhelming Tinker, with underwhelming inventions. A D-list Protectorate cape for a long time. But then he started doing something different. Instead of focusing all on his tech, he began to exercise. To train in self-defense classes. To take Capoeira. To be healthy, and improve his body instead of his tech.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And it worked. Barlow was a solid B-lister down in San Fransisco now, giving the Elite a run for their money.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked down at my hands. At my thin arms. At my pudgy belly. At my legs.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I clenched one fist. There were was no more Creased Spine, there was no more leisure, there was no more time to sit around and bemoan the fact that my tech wasn’t up to snuff.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If I couldn’t make my tech better, I would just have to be better. My city was in ruins, supervillains clashed daily in the waterlogged streets, and I wouldn’t survive it as I was.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I put my copy of </span>
  <em>
    <span>Fragile Things </span>
  </em>
  <span>down on my worktable. I pulled up a home fitness video. There were PRT self-defense courses I could join. Exercises I could do. Carlos had been fit, and tough, and ready for anything the world might throw at him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I would just have to do the same.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Did you know that when you throw yourself into a brick wall, it hurts? Well, the same is true of exercise. I had thrown myself into it, and everything hurt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Not that hurting was in and of itself a bad thing. It worried my parents, sure, when I collapsed on the couch after a day of training and conditioning and patrolling. They would say the usual empty parent concerned things when I spoke in nothing but pained grunts and requests for Tylenol, but it was fine. There was nothing to be worried about.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Every one of my friends had been through worse. They’d endured more pain than this. So I could drag myself to the PRT headquarters every day, and go back into it with renewed energy. I could walk in on the trooper self defense classes and get the crap kicked out of me by the various rough and ready squaddies still left on the job. I could run home instead of taking the bus. I could go to the PRT gym instead of reading.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Tinkering still happened. It had to. I couldn’t exactly stop, especially if I wanted to stay alive. But it was less all-consuming. It wasn’t my only option as far as improvement went. It was still difficult, and painful, and maddening, and incredible, but it wasn’t the only thing I could do. If an idea slipped away from me, I could just do squats or something. If a schematic turned to gibberish in my hands, I could take a break to jog a little. If my inventions were still the useless trash they’d always been, I could just go try to arm-wrestle Missy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Missy still won, of course. A week or two of exercise wouldn’t be enough to change that. But that was fine, because even though it wasn’t making a huge difference just yet, it was making a difference. I was moving with a little more coordination. I could open jars without running them under hot water. I was shaving a couple seconds off my time around the block.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was losing a little less in sparring matches. Hell, even in patrols, I was starting to have an easier time with not getting tossed around by every looter with a bone to pick. It was working, just a little.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And every day I stuck with it through the pain was one more day of having stuck with it to put behind me. I was gaining momentum. I was getting stronger.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Who cares if I didn’t have time for little outings anymore? If I wasn’t reading anything, really? If I was being a little sharper because my pain put me on edge? None of that was a problem. Not like the city was a problem. Not like survival was a problem.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Missy approved. She’d pass me, lying groaning on the little couch in the Wards common room, and she’d ask about what I’d been doing that knocked me out like that, and the conversation would move off of that. It was more friendly than she’d been before with me, before on outings we just didn’t really talk much. But fitness and exercise gave us a little bit of common ground, enough for passing meetings.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sophia did her equivalent of approval, which was mostly sneering at me less and calling me a spineless wimp less often. That was nice. I didn’t know if I was actually less of a spineless wimp than I had been, but I was at the very least a spineless wimp who wasn’t winded by a flight of stairs anymore.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The best thing, though, was that while I was exercising, I couldn’t think. And if I could think, I would just exercise a little harder, and the problem would be solved. I didn’t have to dwell on Carlos’ death. I didn’t have to dwell on Dean’s. I could just eat, sleep, work out, patrol, and Tinker, and thinking could wait for when the wounds were less fresh.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was fine.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dennis came by, at one point. I was sitting in my room, feeling sore and watching random videos about fitness and science and whatever caught my fancy, trying to figure out what to do with tomorrow. Trying was the key word, since pain made it hard to do figuring of any sort.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dennis wanted to see if I wanted to play a video game with him. He’d dug his old console out of the ruins of his house, and miraculously the thing still worked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yo, Chris,” he said, “You remember that racing game you played at my house? The off-road one. I’ve got it hooked up to the tv in the common room, and I’m looking for volunteers to get their butts kicked, since I am, as we all know, the king of drifting.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sorry, Dennis,” I said, “I’m not really in the mood.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You sure man?” he asked. “You loved this one. It’s got the super cool realistic crashing and the one chick you thought was-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Really,” I said, “I’m just not up for it right now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I could almost hear Dennis shrug from outside the door. “Hey, suit yourself, man. Just thought I should let you know. We haven’t gamed in, like, basically forever.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Didn’t you want to beat the campaign so you could get that last car?” I’d forgotten what the car was called, or why beating the campaign was so difficult, but I’d managed to dig something out of the pain-haze at least.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, I guess I’ll give that a shot. See you later, man.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dennis’ footsteps faded away. I put my headphones back on. I clicked play on a video about nutrition, absorbing none of the information. I knew the gists, anyway, having picked them up from somewhere. It made sense. Lean proteins, greens, fruits, whole grains, the sort of stuff people had been telling me to eat since the beginning of forever. Not drinking soda or eating candy just felt like less of a blow, now. Before the city had crumbled, it had been unthinkable. Now?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If not eating sweets was the one sacrifice I’d have to make in the wake of all this destruction, I’d gotten off easy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I even started going to bed early. It was easier, without the urge to be online at all hours talking to people. Internet was spotty, most of my friends were busy licking their own wounds. It just meant more time to put towards fixing myself up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>One subpar Tinker. Minor fixer-upper. Ha.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I turned off my computer and got my running shoes back on. It was about time for me to head home.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It wasn’t enough. It was good. It was helpful. It was finally starting to feel like my body was working with me. But it wasn’t enough.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The city was a war zone. Capes warred in the streets, dueling over chunks of the city to call their territory. Supplies were raided from relief shipments, whole blocks were leveled by warring villains, the remaining people who hadn’t yet found permanent shelter or fled for more livable places had to live under the rule of whatever cape had decided to take over the camp that day.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And I still wasn’t strong enough to do anything about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was Kid Win. I got the milk runs. Worst cases got the skilled, the powerful, the badasses. Clockblocker, Vista, Shadow Stalker, out to save the people, taking risks, fighting for the city’s future.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were rumors going around of transfers in the works. More capes to bolster our little foothold in the city. Fresh Wards, out of some city or other, to back us up. Or, to back them up. I was Kid Win. I didn’t get put on teams with the big names, I didn’t even get put on the teams with the medium sized names, I just ran around with my dinky little laser pistol and told the odd mugger to drop the whatever.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Armsmaster, please. You’ve seen how hard I’ve been working. I can help!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster just shook his head, not even looking up from his soldering apparatus on his workbench. “I appreciate it, Chris. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that strength or no strength we still need someone to go out there and raise morale. The people love you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The people laugh at me!” I could barely contain myself. My latest try at an invention, a simple electrified gauntlet, had failed spectacularly. The balance had felt alright in the training room, but as soon as I got out into the fray with it the dumb thing had suffered malfunction after malfunction. It worked in theory, it sucked in practice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I hadn’t even managed to catch the cape I’d run into. A nobody, a C-lister indie villain, Drift Draft. He’d flown away from me after getting me to zap my own dumb self with my own dumb gauntlet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster looked up from his soldering. “Are you alright, Chris?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I just stared at him. It was a dumb question. He ran a hand over his chin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look, I know that you think you’re ready to take on the world. But you’re still a child, and we have a duty to make sure you don’t get yourself killed out there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What about Hellhound?” I almost yelled it. “She’s barely older than I am.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She’s a villain.” He was infuriatingly calm. Rational. Maybe even correct, and I hated him for it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She sent the Merchants running for their lives!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That doesn’t make what she did wise, or safe.” My fists clenched tighter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What about Vista?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster sighed. “Chris, I think you need to calm down a little. Vista isn’t put on missions any more dangerous than the ones you go on.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She fought Trickster! And Sundancer!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It was an accident.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She almost won! She got away with singed eyebrows!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a quiet moment, where I stood there, breathing hard, tears hissing at the corners of my vision. Armsmaster just looked calm. He wasn’t breathing hard, he wasn’t clenching anything, he wasn’t wringing his hands like the damn fidgety loser I was.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I broke off eye contact with him. I looked anywhere else. There was a sheet of paper on his desk. Paperwork for a Ward transfer out of the city.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My anger flowed away. It was exhausting to hold onto, and I was plenty exhausted from getting beat up in four separate sparring matches.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who’s leaving?” I asked. My voice was quiet. I’d run out of volume.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster’s gaze followed mine, and he stiffened. Then he rubbed his temples. “I thought I’d put that away,” he said, mostly to himself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I waited for him to answer. Hopefully he would.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’ve gotten some reports of Shadow Stalker using some violent methods for dealing with looters, recently.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked. That did sound like her, at least.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So I was considering transferring her to the Eagleton quarantine team. Dendrite’s a good teacher, I figured he’d be able to help her shape up.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My mind whirred for a moment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The Eagleton quarantine team?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster turned back to his soldering. “I didn’t want to have to send her there. It’s not an easy place to do hero work. But we think that being there would be good for her. Besides, the last team just finished their six months, and Dendrite needs new faces to help him out.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Armsmaster?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, Chris?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Could you send me there?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armsmaster didn’t move for a long moment. Then he said, “Chris, getting sent to the Eagleton quarantine team is a punishment. I know you don’t think of yourself as a model hero, but you’re a long way from needing to be sent there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My mind was buzzing, all of the sudden. “It would be great for training me, though. And conditioning me. And maybe giving me a fresh environment to Tinker in. And I would come back, and be able to help the city.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Chris, please. You’d be away from your parents, from your team, from...” He waved one hand, trying to communicate something his words couldn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can handle six months away.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He clearly didn’t believe me, but he did at the very least print out a fresh copy of the transfer paperwork and promise to think about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wasn’t growing here. I wasn’t creating anything new. I wasn’t challenging myself, I was just hammering exercise into my limbs until I wanted to die. But being out on the quarantine zone watch team, that was a place I could be challenged. It was a place where I could improve. Where my name wouldn’t be a joke. Where Sophia wouldn’t sneer at me, and Vista wouldn’t pity me, and Dennis wouldn’t try to improve my mood with his jokes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Somewhere that I wouldn’t be reminded of Carlos. Or Dean. Or all the people in the city who were dead because I hadn’t been there to help.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And, to his credit, Armsmaster did think about it. He even took the time to print out a series of logs summarizing my latest round of patrols, and every time he read about me taking a hit or missing a shot, I could tell he was starting to see what I saw.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Brockton Bay would get three new Wards, it was decided. Sophia would be watched closely, but would stay. And Brockton Bay was also losing one loser.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I packed my bags while my parents worried over me. They wanted to come with, to stop me from going, to hamper my progress and slow me down. So I didn’t listen to their obligatory parental concern. I just packed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Clothes. Weights. Equipment. Essentials. No games or books or toys, nothing Kid Win, perpetual loser and huge dork, would bring. Just the things that I would really need.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eventually, the helicopter landed on top of the PRT building. Three Wards I didn’t recognize got off. I wished them luck. Dennis and Missy waved goodbye. I told them to keep the city safe while I was gone. They promised they would.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was ready. It was time for me to get some real training. Real experience. To put everything I’d been training my body for to the test.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Time to face the Machine Army. I wasn’t ready now, but hey, sink or swim, right?</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>We touched down next to a big blocky PRT barracks they’d converted out of some self-storage place. My phone told me it was just barely on the border between Eagleton and a nearby town called Maryville. My eyes told me that the edge of the quarantine zone was very, very close to it. The barricades and twitchy-looking heavily armed PRT troopers gave it away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite was sitting on the blacktop as we touched down. Seeing her in real life felt a little surreal. Not because of the tentacle arms or the way lights glittered just under her translucent skin, but because of her reputation. She’d fought just about every over the top murderous threat North America had to boast. She’d evacuated civilians from a city the Nine were hitting, she’d dueled Nilbog’s creatures to keep the walls secure, she’d scrapped with villains in Gary and with those monsters in the Elite, and now she was ready to pass on her S-Class tactics on to the next batch of heroes in the works.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>From what Armsmaster had told me about her, she wasn’t half bad, either. Nobody could succeed all the time when wrangling the problem children of the Protectorate, but Dendrite came close. That was part of why Armsmaster had wanted to send Sophia, Dendrite apparently had a stellar track record when it came to getting violent teens to rein it in a little.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I hopped out of the helicopter. The boots of my power armor touched blacktop. I stood in shiny, clean, showy power armor as Dendrite came to meet me. The grit of the place stood around me, the PRT troopers with well-worn equipment and hard expressions, the hastily reinforced little storage lockers turned barracks rooms, the vehicles boasting mud splatters and scratches and rust.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite smiled as she walked over to me, unperturbed by how out of place I was amidst all this reality. She extended one of her tentacles, the end branching into five points. More or less a hand. I shook it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So, you’re the volunteer,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I steeled myself. “I am,” I said. And I would leave my volunteership a better, stronger person. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t ready now. Or that none of my equipment was ready. Or that I was still too weak to deal with this sort of situation. Or that I stood out enough that the entire encampment here could tell that I was just a little kid, totally unprepared for any of this.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Glad to hear it. We could always use more kids like you, who actually want to help out down here. Too many surly types make it hard to actually do my job,” Dendrite had a pleasant voice. It reminded me of the school librarian and writing teacher I had in grade school. It was easy to hear her words, even considering my usual distracted state. It cut through the fog.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My eyes wandered around as I replied. “Where should I set up my equipment?” I asked, while my eyes tracked a gaggle of managerial types. They were armed to the teeth with clipboards and regulatory subclauses and purpose. They vanished into a big block of a building.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite called out, and a pair of PRT troopers broke off from where they were milling around. They helped us unload my stuff from the helicopter. Dendrite said, “Follow me, I’ll show you to the Tinker bay.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We entered the building the managerial types had vanished into. The Tinker bay was down a flight of stairs, in the basement. Dendrite said, “It’s a little messy, the Tinkers we got in the last batch weren’t the cleanest in the world, but you might be able to find some useful stuff in all this junk.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My mind was already skittering excitedly around the room, speculating on things I could do with each part I laid my eyes on. There was so much left on the tables, and in boxes under the tables, and hanging haphazardly from wires in the ceiling, that I hardly knew where to begin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Glad you like it,” Dendrite said, as I picked up what looked to be some sort of cooling apparatus that used the excess heat from whatever it was it cooled to power itself. Somehow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then I had to grab my suitcase full of personal effects and chase Dendrite as she led the way to my bedroom at the barracks. On the way, Dendrite offered chitchat.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re the second one to arrive,” Dendrite said, “Funny, the first person in was a Tinker, too, though she’s a lot different.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Another Tinker?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah. You two’ll have to share the Tinker bay, we’ve only got the one,” Dendrite said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Where are they?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think I saw her headed up to the lounge. It’s just upstairs. I’ll show you as soon as we’ve got your suitcase dropped off in your room.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Imagined pictures of what she looked like crowded into my mind. A Tinker, like me, but one who had been sent here. Tough, probably, so my mind added spikes to her hypothetical armor. Then, because that was silly, it erased them and just made her armor a huge power suit. Then, because that was silly and also wouldn’t fit in the lounge, my mind erased that too and contented itself with images of pretty girls.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Good job, mind. One more thing I can’t count on you for.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My room was very small. There were two cots in it, but Dendrite said it wasn’t likely anyone would be using it. There were only five Wards they had to make room for, so no doubling up would be necessary.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then Dendrite showed me up to the lounge. I double-checked that my armor was on straight, dusted off some dust that might have been there, made sure my visor was good, and Dendrite held the door for me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Kid Win, this is Recoil,” Dendrite said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Stretched out catlike, her top half spilling off the couch and onto the floor, was a girl about my age. Her hair was short, and messy, and went every which way, and which might have had a tree branch in it. There were splashes of dirt and mud on her clothes. She didn’t have any armor on, or even a mask. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Next to her, propped against the couch, was an utter monster of a shotgun. As in, it was the sort of shotgun that other guns would check under their beds for before going to sleep. It had been modded and rebuilt and brutalized and added onto until it was almost too big to be called a shotgun anymore. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>I really, really wanted to work with her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She said, “Sup.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I said, “Hi.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I sat down in a chair, and took out my phone, and didn’t say anything for another fifteen minutes before leaving to find Dendrite and see if there was a gym or something I could use. I would talk to Recoil later. After a workout, at least. Maybe if I tired myself out my mind would settle down long enough to let me say words to another human being. I could only hope.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The workout didn’t help. It just made me crawl to my little bedroom and collapse onto the bed. The best part was that even though I was exhausted and in pain my mind still buzzed like it was a beehive Recoil had kicked. Shotgun ideas, casing ideas, stock ideas, muzzle ideas, guns crowded around my headspace until I wished one of them would just fire in there and leave me in blissful braindamaged silence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite poked her head in. “Just wanted to let you know, set your alarm for seven. We’re getting started at eight, and if you don’t get up early you won’t get a chance to grab breakfast.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I mumbled something into my pillow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Also, dinner’s only being served for another forty-five minutes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I groaned and dragged myself back out of bed. Damn you, body, for actually needing food. And damn you for not needing cake. Or cookies. Or soda. Or all three at the same time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I got broccoli, ham, and a small bowl of mac and cheese. I got a glass of water. I spent a good fifteen minutes sitting there, cutting the ham and broccoli into bits, before mixing them into the mac. Then I ate, alone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil wasn’t in the cafeteria, or I would have at least tried to talk to her. Well, I would have debated talking to her, then sat down alone because I couldn’t think of anything to talk about. Well, I wouldn’t have even debated it. Well, I was a loser. A loser in slightly better shape than usual, but still a grade-A loser.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I ate another plastic forkful of cheese plus noodles plus broccoli plus ham. The macaroni had gotten a little soft and mushy, the cheese had little cold pockets in it, the broccoli had been oversteamed, and the ham had been overcooked. And, funnily enough, the total dish was still less than the sum of its parts.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The nice thing about being exhausted and sore and miserable was that it didn’t matter how terrible the food was, it was still heavenly. Hunger will do that. It didn’t even bother me that I was likely to get to know this cafeteria very intimately over the course of six months. Food was food.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t get dessert. I wanted it, but it wasn’t worth breaking my diet for room-temperature thin store-bought cheesecake slices or tiny individually plastic-wrapped brownies.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then I lay awake in bed, soreness and unfamiliarity serving to keep me infused with insomnia even though all I wanted to do was go to sleep. Distant gunshots did nothing to help.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>By the time my alarm went off in the morning, I’d already been out of bed for half an hour. Late to bed and early to rise makes a man long for the time when he dies. Maybe I’d find the time to take a nap today.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I staggered into the cafeteria behind a group of chipper PRT troopers discussing their morning run. Insult to injury, universe, insult to injury. I grabbed a plateful of rubbery scrambled eggs, a glass of orange juice from concentrate, and two pieces of something bearing a passing resemblance to sausage. Most important meal of the day.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>By the time I got into line out on the blacktop where Dendrite was waiting, I was thoroughly miserable. In line with me was Recoil, who was dozing propped up on her shotgun.  Also there was a thin, sickly girl with dark skin, and a beefy looking guy who had barklike craggy growths all over his skin. I nodded hello to everyone. Nobody nodded back. Everyone looked about as exhausted as I felt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite, on the other hand, seemed perfectly awake. She stood up straight and tall in front of everyone, then began to speak in a voice that boomed in exactly the right way to jolt all of us re-awake.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Kid Win! Recoil! Roost! Crackle! Welcome to your first day of on-the-job training at the Eagleton quarantine zone. I’m Dendrite, and it is my job to make sure none of you get killed out here. Given that your lives are in my hands, when I say jump I want to hear you say how high. Are we clear?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I threw out a, “Yes, ma’am!” Nobody else did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I said, are we clear?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This time, my, “Yes, ma’am,” was accompanied by a loose smattering of vague affirmative noises.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good, now, our schedule for today...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As much as I wanted to pay attention to what Dendrite was saying, it slid off of my tired ears without ever reaching my brain. What did reach my ears was Recoil whispering to the sickly girl next to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Roost or Crackle?” Recoil asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you Roost or Crackle?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Roost.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil hummed. “Recoil. Nice meetin’ ya.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sucks, huh? This whole remedial shit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” said Roost. From what I could tell, Roost didn’t seem terribly interested in talking.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like, we gotta be up by this ass-crack of an hour and then just get lectured at by Sergeant Tentacles over there?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost didn’t reply.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite said, “And, finally, I’ll be taking you out on your first patrol today, those of you who I trust not to do anything stupid. Anyone left behind’s got monitor duty.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Everyone else groaned. I didn’t mind monitor duty so much, it gave me time to think and Tinker and not embarrass myself. Still, that wasn’t going to stop me from trying to avoid it. At the very least, I didn’t want to out myself as a spineless wimp too soon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite sent us off to run laps around the barracks. I started running as soon as she said, “Go,” and only realized it was a misstep when nobody else started. Just me, in red and gold, running off ahead of everyone else.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Behind me, I could hear Dendrite telling everyone else to follow me. Follow Kid Win. Can’t miss him, he dresses gaudily enough the whole camp knows where he is.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As I pumped my legs and cursed my soreness, I debated modifying my armor. But then again, if I did that, how quickly would I get distracted from it and wind up having to go into battle with no chestpiece, missing my left boot?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I put on extra speed. Maybe I could outrun my own stupidity.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Laser pistol. Fully charged. Check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hoverboard. Fully dorky. I loved it anyway. Check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Armor. Shiny. Check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was as ready for patrol as I’d ever be. Dendrite had given everyone a little time to change into their full costumes, to get their gear together, and to rest from the grueling workout she’d forced us through. It was just my luck that I’d had to dig through every bag I’d brought to find the one laser pistol whose settings went past stun. No rest for the Win Kid.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As it happened, I was the last one out to the blacktop where everyone was lining up. I had hoped that Recoil, being a Tinker like me, would have taken some time to get herself ready, but apparently all she’d needed to do was put on a jacket three sizes too big and covered with pockets. I wondered how much of a seizure she’d given her PR department.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Maybe that was why she was here.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nobody seemed to have a particularly complex costume, really. Crackle didn’t even bother with one, just taking off his shirt instead. Roost’s costume had a little more to it, being a flowy robe with vaguely psychedelic color swirling on it, but even that appeared to have just been thrown over her street clothes along with a simple domino mask.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I hoverboarded over, stopping with a little flourish. The hoverboard might have been the dorkiest part of my getup, but it was just so much fun. It was everything my dad had shown me in those bygone days at the skate park, but a hundred times better. And it glowed, besides. Sure, it made me an obvious target, sure it put me several hundred feet in the air with very little between me and a fall to my death, sure jetpacks were more in according to PHO these days, but my hoverboard was mine.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Everyone stared as I smoothly glided to a stop. I sheepishly dismounted. Hopefully they wouldn’t think that was too dorky to deal with. Nobody said anything, but that could be good or bad. Judging by my memories of Sophia, mostly bad.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite led us to a little transport truck. She said that we wouldn’t be headed far, that this was more a chance for her to examine us than for us to get ourselves into trouble. I could only imagine what qualified as trouble to someone like Dendrite. The entirety of the Machine Army converging on her, probably.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nobody said a word in the transport truck. Recoil appeared to have given up on talking to Roost, and was instead angrily scrubbing at a spot on her shotgun. Crackle had just folded his arms and looked away from everyone else. Roost had her eyes closed, possibly napping.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The truck stopped at a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It was a patch of empty field nondescript enough that my eyes refused to look at it. A place so utterly unremarkable that anything happening in it must be somebody else’s problem. A Somebody Else’s Problem Field.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We all got out of the truck while Dendrite began to talk.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Now, I told you this would be a patrol,” she began. “That was a lie. This is a sparring match. I’ve brought one of my colleagues out today to see how well you all do at a simple, nonlethal takedown of someone trying to breach the quarantine.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle said, “Who are we fighting?” His voice didn’t quite seem to fit him, it seemed like he was built like a football star and spoke like a chess club vice president. I managed to keep myself from reacting, but we could all hear Recoil snicker.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite said, “You think every time somebody is trying to breach quarantine they’ll stop to tell you their name first?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then it was go time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first thing I did was take off, to get a bird’s eye view and figure out who we were fighting. The first thing Recoil did was crouch low to hide in the grass, and creep forward with her shotgun at the ready. The first thing Crackle did was to stomp loudly after her. The first thing Roost did was to stand perfectly still.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The ground around Roost began to melt. That explained the costume, and the name. It liquefied into a colorful slurry and oozed slowly towards her, flowing up her legs and dyeing her costume and all the same green-brown-grey mix of the field liquefied around her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then I spotted him. He was wearing bog-standard PRT Trooper armor, was totally unarmed, and had just burst out of the grass to run towards us.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I yelled, “Over there!” like the extremely helpful person I am. Then I took a couple potshots with my laser pistol, to actually show everyone else where I meant them to look. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When I yelled, he went translucent. Crap. Who did I know that went translucent? Did I know any cape that did that? He’d stopped pushing the grass out of the way in front of him, now just phasing through it. Nothing occurred to me, so I just turned my laser pistol to a low setting and shot him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He glowed where the beam hit him. Was that good? I didn’t know.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now that Recoil saw him, she popped up out of the grass, leveled her shotgun, and fired. The crackling electricity-burst arced across the field and hit him dead on. He glowed more. That being our plan, I began to fire laser at him from above, try to get him to slow down, or something.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wasn’t even trying to dodge. All my shots were doing was making him glow. Glowing was probably bad, then. Right?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The electricity that had hit him arced off him again, lancing through to air to strike a little capsule Recoil had expelled from her gun. The capsule began to glow, and Recoil jumped after it and shoved it back into her gun, before using the electricity attack again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Neat.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle moved in to engage. I tried to provide some covering fire, but my shots all swerved in midair sto strike Crackle instead. The mystery cape’s power? No, my shots had just turned into electricity that danced across his skin. So that’s what his power did. Unfortunately, as he moved in to engage, he also drew in the electricity that was trying to get past him to Recoil’s capsule. She cursed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle began to swing at the cape, and the cape simply phased through them, the electricity vanishing into them and making them glow more.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That was when Roost finished her melting thing, and swirling head to toe with greens and yellows and browns, she charged in too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Neither of them seemed to be accomplishing anything. Recoil seemed to mostly be trying to fiddle with something on her gun. I flew around, trying to get a better angle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The cape phased through a blow, and then his glowing seemed to hit maximum capacity, and he stopped moving. I managed to get half a warning out before he exploded, sending Crackle and Roost flying. Roost’s colors drained out of her as she flew. Crackle’s skin buzzed like a tesla coil, and he crashed into Recoil, and they both went down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My team was taken out in one fell swoop. Shit. He didn’t seem to have any ranged weapons on him, and he was corporeal again, so I tried to climb a little higher without leaving my gun’s range, and took a couple shots.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He grabbed Recoil’s gun, dodged a shot from me, and then threw the whole Tinkertech mess at me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hit me dead on.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I spun, out of control, and crashed into the ground. I groaned. He put his boot on my head, and pressed my nose into the dirt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, nice try, kids. You’ll get me next time, no worries.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hearing encouraging words from the man whose boot was on my head just made the whole situation feel all the more humiliating. He was a Protectorate cape, sure. He was experienced, a good fighter, he might have even gotten briefed on our powers beforehand. But I couldn’t shake that little voice in the back of my head, right next to where the boot was, that said that if I had just tried harder, if I’d only built more, if only I’d been less of a lazy, spineless, good-for-nothing fuckup.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If only, then my friends would still be here.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The mood was sour on the way back. Crackle was sitting with his fists clenched together in his lap, and every so often a little growl would escape him. Roost had taken it upon herself to flip off both Dendrite and the other hero, whose name I never did catch, before getting back into the truck. Recoil was going over her gun in an angered frenzy, rubbing grass stains off of it, grimacing at every dent it had acquired bouncing off my skull.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I couldn’t blame her. Her shotgun had clearly had a lot of time and effort poured into it. Not only that, but when it had been taken from her it had been thrown. Like a stick. If someone had done that to my hoverboard I probably would have been just as mad. As it was it was quick work to wipe the dirt off my armor and hoverboard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It said something very disappointing about my hero career that it had been important to make my equipment easy to clean. I wiped out enough that it was practically a necessity. A painful necessity.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Our consolation prize was that Dendrite was going to wait until tomorrow to lecture us on all the numerous things we did wrong. She was going to compare notes with the other hero, and bring it up to all the protectorate capes in the base, and then and only then rub our noses in it. Or at least that was the impression I got.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, it gave me time to Tinker. As soon as the truck got back to the barracks, I struck out for the Tinker bay. My Alternator Cannon was languishing in the hell of Protectorate safety approval, but I had some half-projects I was hoping to get into working order. Plenty of time. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep well anyway. That boot was weighing too heavily on my mind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I flitted between the tables in the Tinker bay for a solid hour, getting very little done and getting very excited about it, when Recoil walked in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” I said, arm-deep in a box of variously-sized metal frames.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” Recoil said. She sounded angry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sorry about your gun,”” I said, because I couldn’t think of much else to say.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll live,” she said. “There a spare soldering iron in here?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pointed to the table behind me. “There’s a couple in the cabinet under there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She tromped over to the cabinet, opened it, grabbed a soldering iron, then headed for the door again. I wanted to say something. Anything. I wanted to talk to her, to exchange ideas for new inventions and schematics of old ones, to know what her power did and what she thought mine was. I didn’t know why she’d been sent here, but we were both Tinkers, and that had to count for something, right?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I went for broke. “Hey, why don’t you stay down here. I’m curious what your inventions do.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She stopped. “What,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I gulped, then kept going. “I want to work together. I haven’t actually figured out my specialty yet, and I was hoping to hear your thoughts on, you know, tinkering.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Very slowly, Recoil turned around. Painful silence hung in the air, next to the abandoned canisters suspended by wire from the ceiling.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, right. You just want to make fun of the redneck for trying to Tinker without knowing any of the stupid school shit,” she said, finally. “I know your type. You think you’re all cool cause you know how fast gravity is.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She stormed up to me, gripping her shotgun tight in one hand and the soldering iron in the other. “Well get this, Kid Win.” She said my cape name with the same sort of vitriol Sophia used for Piggot. “I ain’t gonna take none of your shit, and I ain’t buying none of what you’re selling, and you’re just gonna have to fucking deal with that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She turned to storm out. It was strange to see this from the other side. It was exactly the sort of thing I felt every time we met another Wards team and I started talking to their Tinker. As soon as my dyscalculia came up, the conversation became coddling, and patronizing. Like they thought I wasn’t a real Tinker.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pulled off my helmet. “It’s Chris. My name’s Chris.” She stopped, turning to look at me, halfway through another angry retort, but I cut her off. “Look. I know how that feels. I know what it’s like to have other people keep treating you like you aren’t a real Tinker. Because you don’t seem like a nerd, or whatever. I can’t...” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>I gulped, looked away, and steeled myself. We were the same. I had to reach out to her. “I can’t work with numbers. I can’t hold them with my head, I’m terrible with math, I can’t even read a clock right. Everything I make is simple because I can’t get myself to focus long enough to actually make anything worth using.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I took my pistol off from behind my back, to show to her. “Look at this. Compared to your shotgun, this is nothing. I want to work with you. Please.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil placed the soldering iron down on the table, and picked up my pistol. “It looks fancy,” she said, but she didn’t leave, and she didn’t seem so angry. I offered her a screwdriver, and she popped open a panel on the pistol, to look at its insides.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It doesn’t seem like a bad thing,” she said. “I mean, there ain’t a lot in here, but it’s not bad. And your flying skateboard thing, that looked, I mean you looked like a damn good Tinker up there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I shrugged. “I looked shiny. There’s nothing behind it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looked at me, and then she looked back at the pistol in her hands, and then she said, “Listen, I think I pegged you wrong. I thought you were some big shot from the city who transferred in to laugh at us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I had to laugh a little at that. “I am the furthest thing from a big shot you could find.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“See, but a big shot wouldn’t have even let me touch their stuff. Don’t. They don’t let me. I don’t know if you were pullin my leg with the math stuff earlier, but I think...” She paused for a moment, then took off her domino mask. “I think you seem alright. Lana. Name’s Lana.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I helped Lana carry her box of spare bits down to the Tinker bay, and the two of us spent the evening working together. I wasn’t any more focused than usual, or productive, or better, but at the very least I was being not better with someone else. I could live with that.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I was so happy about getting a chance to work with Recoil, I didn’t find something to kick myself for until I made it back to my room. I’d spent the entire time talking to her about Tinker business, and not once did I stop to try to actually talk to her. And, oddly enough, learning what sort of flux capacitors a girl likes to put in her grenades doesn’t tell you a lot about her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Given what she’d said to me about not getting treated like a real Tinker, though, I could take a wild guess.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I rolled myself out of bed the next morning, bright and early. It was miserable and I hated every minute that I spent out of bed, but those chipper PRT troopers had enjoyed a morning run yesterday, and maybe if I suffered through one as well I could steal a bit of their chipperness and use it to spice up breakfast a little.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It didn’t really work, and I wasn’t exactly happier after having exercised for a hard-won plastic tin of cereal, but there was a sense of grim satisfaction at having gotten showing my muscles who’s boss bright an early. I showed them that their boss was pain and exhaustion, mostly, but small victories.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then it was time for me to line up with the rest of the gang out on the blacktop, and listen to all the numerous things Dendrite could find wrong with our performance yesterday. I just walked, this time, hoverboard tucked under one arm. I’d lost the same as everyone else, showing off today would be in poor taste.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil was willing to give me a nod in greeting when I lined up next to her. That was good, at least. Hopefully I’d have a chance to just talk with her later, without so much Tinkering getting in the way. Just seeing her nod was enough to send my brain into fits of laser pistol modifications and fresh hoverboard upgrades based off of things she’d said and done yesterday. I tried to clamp down on that. It didn’t work, fits didn’t exactly work that way, but hopefully it would be good practice for trying to talk to her later.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite began to lecture. She went down every split second of the very short fight, telling us every mistake we’d made in fighting the other cape, apparently named Drifter, down to the split-second. There were a lot of them. Mistakes of form, mistakes of impulse, mistakes of judgement.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was one very big, important theme that stood out among all of the mistakes we’d made. That was that we hadn’t communicated. We hadn’t been coordinated. We hadn’t, in short, used the fact that we outnumbered Drifter four to one to our advantage.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It made a lot of sense. Teamwork had always been one of the core tenets of my stay with the Wards, and those few times we really managed to use that tenet were the times when we’d shined. And those times where one of us hadn’t been there for the team cost us dearly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite suggested that we begin by saying words to each other, out loud, rather than sit there and be vaguely surly at the world around us all day. We’d had a solid length of time in the truck to and from the sparring match yesterday to do it, and we hadn’t then. As such, she would make sure it happened now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>First, though, we had basic daily conditioning to do. That basic daily conditioning was longer, harder, and more painful than the daily conditioning we’d done yesterday. Dendrite wanted us to learn from our mistakes, I supposed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t too miserable after the exercise was done. I was exhausted, yes. I was winded, sure. But I couldn’t have imagined doing exercise like this before I’d started trying to get myself in shape, back in Brockton Bay. From the looks of poor Roost, she couldn’t imagine herself doing exercise like this even as she did it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, by the time Dendrite’s little social exercise came around, I think everyone short of Crackle was thankful for a chance to experience anything that wasn’t exercise, even if it was just some cheesy get-to-know-you game.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Since this was Wards boot camp, it wasn’t some cheesy get-to-know-you game. It was more like the social interaction version of sink or swim. You had to get three personal bits of information out of everyone else in an hour, and if you didn’t get them, or tried to make them up because apparently a cape on here could detect lies and was willing to spare their time to this, you would have to do the entirety of the physical conditioning all over again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The catch? Only the first three people to bring their information bits to Dendrite would have theirs counted. Meaning somebody would have to do all of that physical conditioning all over again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Which meant as soon as the whistle blew I walked up to Crackle, who Lana and Roost were conveniently avoiding, to talk to him. He glared down at me with the sort of quiet ominousness that most villains would envy, and I steeled myself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey. I’m Kid Win, if you, uh, didn’t catch my name before.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He said nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look, I don’t know if you noticed, but Roost was having a bit of a hard time out there earlier.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He said nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And it seemed like you were powering through that course like it was nothing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He said nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Would it be alright if you just did the punishment yourself? If it’s not too much to ask. I don’t want to see Roost collapsing from exhaustion out there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He said nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I racked my brain for anything I could add. These people were here on punishment detail, so some kind of incentive wouldn’t be amiss. He certainly didn’t look like the sort of person willing to do things out of the goodness of his heart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’d be happy to put in a good word for you to Dendrite. I’m here as a volunteer, so I think she’d be willing to listen to me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle said, “You’re here voluntarily?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>I cursed myself inwardly. That was a piece of information, same as anything else, and if he was trying to win I just handed it to him on a silver platter. Worse, he’d probably resent me for it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He chuckled. “Man, I was bawling like a motherfucker when I heard I’d been sent here. Machine Army scares me shitless. You’ve got some balls, man.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Oh.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, I’d be happy to take the hit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thanks! I’ll go tell the others,” I said, happy that this worked out in my favor. I turned, only to find that Roost and Recoil were standing a good distance apart from each other, backs turned, not talking to each other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hooray. I had thought that getting the go-ahead from Crackle would have been the easy part. Looks like Kid Win was wrong, as usual. If only I could weld social situations together with the sort of ease I didn’t have welding my inventions together.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But you couldn’t spell ‘Kid Win’ without ‘doesn’t know when to quit’. It was always either too soon or too late. Too soon for my inventions, and too late for, well, this.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I decided to start with Recoil. We weren’t friends yet, not quite, but having gotten past the main hurdle of talking to her at all I figured I’d have a better chance with her. Especially considering what I’d seen of Roost so far.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, Recoil.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So, I talked to Crackle,” I began, and Recoil turned to look at me. Her eyes flicked over to Crackle standing ominously in the background, then back to look at me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Really?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He said he’d be willing to do the exercise over. I mean, you saw him out there, right? He didn’t even break a sweat.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t see anything except me dying out there. Fuck, like, I know that if I’d run that course before...” Recoil stopped, catching herself mid-sentence. “Anyway, tell him thanks for me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, that’s not all,” I said, “I was actually gonna see if you’d be willing to let Roost go up first. It looked like she was really hurting after the run.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good luck,” Recoil said, bitterly. “I went up to her ‘cause I wanted to give her my info so she could quit being such a bitch to me, and she cussed me out for it!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look, you wanna try and be nice to that ungrateful shitstain you can be my fucking guest, but I’d rather send my pride parade pics to my grandparents than do her any more favors,” she said. She then followed it up with a huff that the big bad wolf would have been proud of, and the conversation was over.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I turned towards Roost, who was already glaring in my direction, and got myself ready for an uphill battle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All I could get out was a, “Hey,” before Roost cut me off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look. I told little miss trigger-happy this and I’m gonna tell you the same thing. I don’t take charity. Take your bullshit and shove it up your ass.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I was just worried--” I began, but Roost cut me off again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well too fucking bad for you. I’m gonna take those extra laps, dickless, so you should shut the fuck up and get out of my way.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sighed. The verbal abuse was fine. I’d had plenty of time to get used to that sort of thing back home. But I didn’t want to see Roost get herself hurt because she wanted to prove something. Even if she was trying to use her anger to pop my helmet open.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Roost, I just want to make sure you’ve thought it through. I’m sure Dendrite wouldn’t want you to--”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What Dendrite wants doesn’t matter a rat’s ass to me! I want to run those laps, and an asshole like you isn’t going to have anything to say that’ll change my mind. So why don’t you march right back over to your girlfriend and let her take your fucking handouts. Maybe you’ll get some head out of it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At this point, I didn’t think there was much else I could say. She was right, she had dug herself into her opinion and nothing was going to get her out of it. There was one other thing I could try, instead. I headed over to where Dendrite was chatting with someone else in full PRT gear, probably the Thinker she’d mentioned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well?” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I actually had a question. If I brought you my information, could you let Roost get out of running instead of me?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sure,” Dendrite said, “But you’ll have to run the laps.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Great. Crackle cried like a motherfucker when he was transferred here, Recoil went to a pride parade, and Roost wants to prove that she can take an extra round of physical conditioning.” I just listed the first thing about everyone else that came to mind. It felt a little mean, going behind Roost’s back to do this, but I’d rather get her angry than see her collapse on the blacktop. I was no Crackle, but I could power through a little extra exercise just fine.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite gestured, and I took off running.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was only a few moments heavy I heard heavy footsteps coming up from behind. Crackle, running in that precise mechanical way of his. I slowed down a touch, to let him catch up to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What gives?” he asked. “I thought I was gonna do this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Roost wanted to do the extra exercise, too, but Dendrite said I could give Roost my free pass if I ran.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh.” He paused for a moment, and I took the opportunity to drag some extra breath in. Running and talking weren’t a great combination. Then he said, “How come you wanted to let her get out of this? Seemed like she was being a bitch to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So? I still didn’t want to see her get hurt.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You like her?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I made the most noncommittal noise I could while running. “I barely know her.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, it’s pretty cool of you. I’ll run too,” Crackle said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My limbs were jelly by the time we finished. Crackle let me lean against him as we walked back to where everyone else was. Dendrite was talking to a surly-looking Roost. Recoil ran up to us.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jeez, you okay?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I gave her a thumbs up. I didn’t want to use air for talking. I needed it to keep my body from bursting into flame.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, you really pissed off Roost.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I shrugged. Crackle said, “She’ll get over it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Dendrite’s been chewing her out for not knowing when to quit,” Recoil said. “What a bitch. I’d gladly suck cock for a chance to skip tomorrow’s workout.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I laughed as much as my current state of exhaustion let me. Then I said, “Don’t tell Roost that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil and Crackle didn’t really get the joke. That was fine. I was too tired to bother explaining it, and they seemed fine with just letting me laugh. Across the blacktop, I saw Roost storm off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Oh well. I could try talking to her later, when my everything was hurting less. Dendrite came over and patted me on the back, then told Recoil and Crackle to take me up to the lounge to rest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A good day, all things considered.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>While I rested on the couch in the lounge, hating that I had nerves, Recoil and Crackle chatted. Now that it was obvious Crackle wasn’t anything like his appearance would suggest, Recoil seemed to have an easy time talking with him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah there was this one girl I thought was pretty cool back home. Sucks though, I cracked my stupid phone wide open and now I can’t text her,” Recoil said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why not get a new phone?” Crackle asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You think I can afford a new phone on the dumb probationary paychecks they give out? I gotta save up, and even then it’s gonna be shitty.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why not build one?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just because I’m a Tinker doesn’t mean I can just do that whenever. Unless, maybe...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And so on. I contributed occasionally, but just being around a conversation was plenty when I was too tired to actually take part in it. It was nice to see Recoil and Crackle chatting. It felt right. Teams should be able to talk to each other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eventually, it was time for all of us to go get lunch, and then we would have all the rest of the afternoon and evening to ourselves. Given that I was already pretty well worn out, I wouldn't be able to spend it exercising. As much as I would like to think I could put a whole afternoon into inventing something I was very aware that it would wind up with nothing having been actually done. It wasn't though I had much else to do, though. My books were in Brockton Bay, ditto my games. I didn't want to be distracted from training, but facing a day of downtime was starting to feel daunting.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were serving pizza in the cafeteria. It was a far cry from good pizza, but even bad pizza is still pizza. I got two slices. I also got a nice big scoop of oversteamed broccoli, so that the meal wouldn't make me feel guilty about eating poorly. The three of us sat down together.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So, I was thinking,” Recoil said. “We’ve got the day off, right? There’s gotta be a grocery store in...whatever town we’re next to that's not chock full of evil robots.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maryville,” Crackle supplied.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, that,” said Recoil. “And there’s gotta be a lounge kitchen, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You cook?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nah,” Recoil said, “But I’m sick of this shit." She held up her glass of orange juice from concentrate, swishing the juice around a little to emphasize it. “I got a juicer way back when and since then going back to this kills me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I cook,” Crackle said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh fuck yeah! No more cafeteria food for this squad, we’re gonna eat like kings,” Recoil said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t cook that well,” Crackle said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Dukes?” asked Recoil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” said Crackle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Wealthy nobles?” asked Recoil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Warmer,” Crackle said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Merchants?” I offered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That sounds about right,” said Crackle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That settles it,” Recoil said. “We ain’t eating cafeteria dinner tonight.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wasn’t going to get much Tinkering done today anyway. I could always just get to it later this evening. And I could pick up some veggie chips or something. Snacky, but also healthy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A helpful trooper showed us where the little lounge kitchen was, and Recoil went and dug a blender out of her room to install on the counter there along with a little note declaring it hers and telling people that if they messed the blender up the next one she made would be tinkertech.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is that an empty threat?” I asked her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ve been trying to make it. It’s got nothing to do with what I usually make, but fuck it, I want a tinkertech smoothie machine.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With that we headed out into town. There was a little shuttle bus to bring troopers into town, so we climbed aboard and headed off to find a good grocery.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil bought a few mangoes, a bunch of bananas, a box of strawberries, a box of blueberries, some carrots, a bag of spinach, and a bottle of kefir. Recoil said to shut up about how hipstery it was because it made really damn good smoothies. Neither me nor Crackle commented on it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle bought a couple packages of soba noodles, some sauces, a head of cabbage, and some chicken. He said he remembered a really simple yakisoba recipe he found online. Both me and Recoil agreed that it would be worlds better than the cafeteria.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I bought a bag of veggie chips and another of corn chips, then after some deliberation sprang for some cheese. Nachos are easy and delicious, I explained. This prompted Crackle to pick out some beef to also add to the nachos, as well as some avocados and tomatoes and other assorted things to make guacamole with. Recoil and I were very impressed with him. He shrugged and said all the recipes were just online, that’s how he learned. This didn’t stop us from being impressed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We were all in good spirits until Dendrite came up to us on our way back to the lounge to stash our loot.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re heading out. Troopers spotted machines moving south. The other heroes are all busy. Get ready, be in the truck in ten.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle grabbed all of the ingredients and ran for the lounge. Recoil and I dashed for the Tinker bay. We both had some last-minute equipment changes to make.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As we ran, she asked, “You scared?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I said, “Yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She said, “Me too. Let’s fuck em up.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil dove for the grenade launcher attachment. I dove for a prototype high-output power source to juice up my pistol. Recoil grabbed an armful of untested grenades and stashed them in her costume’s pockets. I shoved the power source into the pistol, begging for it to work, then for good measure I grabbed a bunch of random tools and pieces, stuffed them in a bag, and brought that too. Maybe I could figure out something on the way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost was already waiting in the truck. She looked away from me angrily when I waved. Dendrite began to lecture all of us on each others’ powers as we drove off, but I couldn’t really listen. I ripped the bag open and tried to make something, anything, work.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We were about to face the Machine Army. I needed all the help I could get.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Chapter 11</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The power source got swapped in. The cooling vent I’d found on day one was modified slightly and hastily improvised into a stock. There was a barrel that I had been planning to use on something else, on a sort of nonlethal flamethrower, but I could see that if I tweaked the output side of things and hooked it onto the laser pistol, it might work. Then I stitched the power source of the vent into the gun itself, and tried to get them to link up in sequence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a chunk of equipment I’d been planning to make into a new visor, but I snapped the glass-like bit in half and patched that into the gaping hole in the side of my pistol that the old plate couldn’t fit into anymore. A few quick modded lines of code and it became a kludgy sort of control screen that I could flip open to the side.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then the truck stopped as I was trying to figure out what to do with a prototype ablative plate Recoil had been curious about looking at, and time was up. I set the pistol to charge itself. I could hear it humming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite said, “Come on!” and I was the first one out of the truck. Two running steps and then I snapped my hoverboard onto my boots’ magnet locks and glided smoothly to a stop behind Dendrite.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We had arrived at a thoroughly unremarkable stretch of small town, bordering a copse of trees. A group of PRT soldiers huddled behind a sturdy and organic looking concrete barricade. Had a cape made this?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite turned to us. “We hold them off. They do not cross the barricade. And, this is the important thing: you are here to buy time. You are not heroes yet, don’t act like it. Don’t let yourself fall down. Don’t let them get you. Most importantly, stay sharp. If they’ve moved past the barricade without our knowing somehow, you will want to know before a missile hits you in the back.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil said, “Fuck.” I agreed wholeheartedly. 20% power on the modded laser pistol.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m going to be commanding you four. If you have complaints, choke them down until after you’ve lived through this and then we can talk. Put your earbuds in. Let’s go,” Dendrite said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We moved towards the barricade. A trooper ran to meet us. “Fuck. Everyone’s busy?” were the first words out of her mouth. Dendrite nodded. “Fuck,” the trooper repeated, then said, “It took us a while to notice, but those trees have been creeping closer for the last two hours, and Killiman swears the house didn’t have a garage during his last shift here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite nods. I shuddered. Any terrain here might be filled with the Machine Army? I’d heard rumours of what it was like, but being this close to something deadly hidden inside something so innocuous felt terrifying on a level that had me trembling in my armor. Something like this breaking containment, making any suburb potentially a murderous entity out of a cheesy kids horror novel, would make it so that there wasn’t safety anywhere. Anywhere could be death. Anything could be a landmine.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I gripped my pistol with shaky hands. 34% charged. Fuck. Why was I not a better Tinker?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They’re going to push!” someone yelled.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In front of me, a tree unfolded like a stick insect. Bark glued onto gleaming silver metal, joints uncurling, pistons stretching, blades swinging down from the long forelimbs and out of every tree branch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Gunfire sounded out. Dendrite began to yell commands. I didn’t listen to what everyone else was supposed to do. I only heard, “Win! Get high! Shoot! Tell us where they are!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My hoverboard vibrated under my feet, and then I was off, riding high into the sky. I could see them. More trees unfolding. Massive cubes rising from the earth, dirt pouring off their monolithic bodies. Missile launchers showed themselves. Barrels of guns. Spinning blades. Death, death, death.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The gun was a leaden weight in my hand. I could feel pieces of it jitter and shake when I moved. I could feel how the trigger wobbled slightly, how the display screen crackled, how the barrel wobbled where I hadn’t attached it quite well enough.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sighted down it, and as I opened fire I screamed into the comms.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first shot was a blazing red-orange bolt, larger and somehow less laser than it had been before. I struck one of the tree-robot’s knife limbs. There was an explosion. The limb fell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Missiles arced towards me. I raced. I dialed settings into the gun. I weakened the magnet grips on my boots, and as I fired I kickflipped my hoverboard. A blast of almost-laser almost-mist, wide, almost a cone, came out of my gun. The missiles exploded, and my hoverboard spun, and as the antigravity panels aimed up at me I got just enough of an upward boost to spot a tree-machine swing a blade at me, miss my feet by inches, and then my hoverboard and my feet attached themselves to each other, and I kept moving.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I yelled locations. I yelled numbers. I yelled types. Down on the ground, Dendrite’s tentacles had gone fractal, and they crackled with electricity as they spread into a writhing thinning cone. Recoil was lobbing grenade after grenade, and her grenades bounced back over to her after they’d exploded. Somehow Recoil made them un-explode too. I still didn’t quite get how.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle was standing next to Roost as she melted the ground around her. He slogged through the murky mush, attracting missiles and gunfire to him and sparking with energy running all up and down his skin. He was breathing heavily. A missile crashed into him, and exploded, and he bounced backwards, and he staggered back hit feet, and then Roost was ready and the two of them charged on Dendrite’s command.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nobody was dead, yet. A lot of us were hurt, but nobody was dead.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then the ground under Recoil’s feet shuddered, and great mechanical jaws like a bear trap rose up on either side of her, and I threw a command into my helmet and dove for the ground and my hoverboard went whizzing into the jaws and shoved Recoil out of them, and then I hit the ground hard and tried to roll and my visor crackled and my armor crunched and I wound up sitting on my butt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A tree loomed over me. The blades whirred. My gun’s charge was 56%. Not good enough.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I tapped ‘Full Power’ and fired anyway.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Chapter 12</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The split second it took to depress the trigger took an eternity. I could feel the gun begin to vibrate in my hand. I could see the tree’s blades coming for my head. I could smell ozone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then the gun fired.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t a clean blast. It was messy, half-formed, half-complete. It was less of a gun being fired and more of a pipe bursting. The flood of red-orange not-quite-laser leapt forward like this was the moment it had been waiting for, and tackled the tree head on, and there was a crack, and the tree stumbled back. Scorch marks coated it. Limbs hung limp and broken off of it. My gun said 0%.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I clicked the trigger again, out of sheer terror. Nothing happened. That was it. I was out of options. The Alternator Cannon was in a warehouse somewhere awaiting review. My hoverboard was in the dirt somewhere. My armor was dented. My visor was fizzing. My gun had proven that no matter how much tinkering i tried to pack into a truck ride, it still couldn't hold up. It was just buying time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The tree lunged. I tried to roll out of the way. There was just too much tree to escape.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck! Off!” Roost yelled, and crashed into the tree as it fell. I could see that technicolor swirl of hers dripping off her arms as she held the tree up. I ran.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A shot from Recoil sent the tree flying away, and Roost only flipped her off before leaping at the garage robot and pounding its shingles with her fists.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My earpiece said, “Get the hell out of there, Kid!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then Dendrite, tentacles wrapped firmly around one of the missile-firing robots, sparks flying madly, passed into my field of view. She wrestled the drone in front of her, and more sparks flew, and then the missiles began to fly at the other Army robots, and I couldn’t help but watch in awe. Dendrite in real life.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A blade flew off and stabbed itself into the dirt next to me. Thin metal streamers began to spread into the dirt, like a sapling taking root. I ran and didn’t stop until I was behind the truck we’d driven here in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The other heroes arrived. A flying cape whose costume I couldn’t make out carried Drifter high over the battlefield. Drifter went intangible. The flying cape paused in the air for a moment, then a thin beam of flame lanced out, passed straight through Drifer who began to glow bright, and melted straight through another tree. Dendrite’s long tentacles grabbed the rest of the Wards and threw them all next to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Drifter hit the ground, and the battlefield exploded sideways. Those scraps of land we’d been fighting for all just uprooted themselves and flew back over the containment line. Drifter stood by proudly as the flying cape began to fire beams of flame into random points on the ground.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite gestured to the truck. Nobody argued.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle nursed one arm. Something had scored a hit, making a long jagged gash through his barklike skin. Smaller cuts scored him. He was covered in enough scorch marks that he looked about two shades darker. He stared silently at the floor of the truck.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost’s technicolor mess flowed off of her and out onto the ground as she stepped up into the truck. She looked exhausted. She had deep, heavy bags under her eyes. She coughed, once, and that cough brought more on until she was sitting down doubled over. Even then, she still wheezed weakly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil had a cut on her forehead that was oozing blood down onto her mask. Her jacket was torn and grass-stained in a dozen places. Her pockets were all empty. Her bandolier was empty. Her shotgun had taken a dreadful hit at some point, and it was plain to see that the grenade launching portion of it had been cut nearly in half. She looked like she wanted to melt her shotgun with her glare. She had my hoverboard under one arm, but hadn't offered it back yet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pried open the side of my pistol. A cloud of smoke came out of it, sending me coughing. The insides had melted almost entirely to slag. It would take a long time to repair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pulled off my helmet. It was dented and banged up, and the visor had cracked thoroughly enough the cracks reached the thin band of electronics Armsmaster had helped me design. It would take a long time to repair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite said, “You lived. Good job.” She seemed fine. She was incredible. Or a monster. Or both. She went around to sit in the front.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Silence choked us as the truck began to drive away. I could see behind the barricade that fresh grass was already beginning to appear at the machines’ behest where Drifter had scoured the dirt clean behind the barricade. The trees were already being repaired and repurposed. The house, half collapsed in on itself, was already becoming whole again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I said, “We’re not dead.” It felt like someone had to say it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil said, “I hadn’t noticed.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle chuckled weakly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost raised a shaky hand to flip me off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nobody said anything else for the rest of the ride. I gave up on my pistol. I could repair it when I wasn’t still waiting to see if my survival had been a lie. It was hard to believe. We’d fought the Machine Army. And we were hurt and miserable and scared, but we were alive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil gave me my hoverboard back. She said, “Thanks.” She left.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I tossed my freshly ruined junk into a pile in the Tinker bay and advanced straight to my room. Do not pass go. Whatever. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>I collapsed bonelessly onto my bed. Only once I had lain there for a good solid ten minutes did i decide to take off the rest of my armor. Sleep took me in about five seconds flat, and I was grateful for it. I didn't dream. I just rested. That was enough.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Chapter 13</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I felt like crap waking up, sweaty, mouth cottony, my entire body complaining as I moved, discarding clothing and making my way to the shower.</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>I gargled hot water there, letting the hot spray hit me until I woke up properly. Drying off and putting clothes on was still difficult to get through. One leg in, then the other. One leg in, then the other. Shirt on. Arms through holes. Head through hole. </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>Stumbling down to the common room was another task, but all I could think was that cafeteria food was the last thing I wanted. I’d just make myself something. </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>There was Lana, sitting there at a table, sipping away at a purplish drink. "Hey," I said.</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"Yo," she said, standing, walking to the fridge. "You're lookin' like shit."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"Yeah..." I said. My ribs hurt when I breathed, but they didn't make the creaking noise that broken ones did. So probably just bruised. "Feel like it."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>She handed me a glass and a plate. Inside the glass was the same purplish drink she'd been sipping at. On the plate was yellowish toast with golden-brown singe-french toast. With some sliced bananas and strawberries. "Thank you," I said, my mouth half-open in surprise and joy. "Did you..?"</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>She nodded, returning to her seat. </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>I followed her. "Can I?" I asked.</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>Lana looked at me like I was stupid. I felt stupid. I sat. She smirked. I peeled the saran wrap off the drink, taking a long gulp. I hadn't realized how thirsty I was. It was sweet and mild, not strong, tasting of milk, fruit, and ice. It woke me up properly, and I would have kept gulping if I didn't want some of the french toast.</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"Blueberries, spinach and a banana," she said. "Some honey."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"Thanks," I said. I fell back in my chair. "Good work yesterday," I said, staring at the ceiling, then turning my eyes back to her. </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>She didn't reply with anything other than a noncommittal noise.</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"We lived," I said, trying to joke. "That's what we were supposed to do, right?"</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"I broke your board," Lana said. "I fucked up. It was my fault."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"It's not your fault-"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was pointing a finger at me, up on her feet, her chair skidding back. "Yes it fuckin' is—and it ain't fair to you that I got it-"</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"We're a </span>
  <em>
    <span>team</span>
  </em>
  <span>-"</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"I fucked up!"</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"So did I! We're even!" I sagged back into my seat. "If I'd loaded my pistol sooner I might have not needed to do that. If I'd figured out how to use it better, it wouldn't have been a threat."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"And I walked </span>
  <em>
    <span>straight</span>
  </em>
  <span> into it," said Lana, her hands balled up into fists, but she was sitting too. "If that ain't the stupidest thing, I don't know what is."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"And you saved me, too," I said. </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"I want to be better than </span>
  <em>
    <span>this</span>
  </em>
  <span>," she said.  "I have to be."</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"Me too," I said. "Work together? Maybe we can salvage our stuff?"</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>"I'm fixin' your hoverboard first," Lana said, standing, poking a finger into my chest. "My fault, my responsibility."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay,” I said. I ate some more. It was nice to just eat. Be normal.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite passed by and spotted us. She came in. “Hey. Just wanted to let you guys know, you’ve got the day off. Rest up.” Then she was on her way again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Want to get started after breakfast?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sure,” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>True to her word, the first thing she did was shove a messy pile of her own in progress stuff aside and lay my hoverboard down on the table. We cracked it open together.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hm,” I said. It was damaged worse than I thought from the impacts. Several components were cracked, a regulator had broken open, one of the batteries had burst and sprayed acid over a mess of circuits.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana cracked her knuckles, and we got to work.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Working together was surprisingly smooth. If I got distracted, Lana would poke me or snap her fingers in front of my face or something to keep me on task. It wasn't the most elegant of fixes, but at the very least it kept me working on the hoverboard and only the hoverboard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was also nice because Lana seemed to approach things from a different angle than I did. She saw feedback, and repercussions, and she worked with them. The improvements she made to the power system, the controls, the antigravity panels themselves, all of it with an eye on what it would mean for the whole board, and for me, the rider.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“One of the problems is stability while I’m firing,” I said at one point. “Could you pass me the soldering iron?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Here,” Lana said. “I don’t know how you shoot on this thing at all. Zooming around all the time? I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I shrugged. “It wasn't too hard to get a feel for with a little practice, but it’s still not great.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What’s this?” Lana asked, pulling a box with wires leaping out of it every which way out of my hoverboard’s insides.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That was an old idea I never finished. Just rip it out,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What’s it do?” Lana asked, cracking it open to look at the inside.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I had a friend back home who could freeze things in time for a couple minutes,” I said. “It made them impossible to move or break. I was thinking i could have my board freeze in time to use as a shield. But I couldn't get it to work.” There were more little things like that in my inventions than I could count. Half-gadgets that never panned out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’d take a shitload of power,” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana grabbed the soldering iron back and started working on the module.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It doesn't work, there’s nothing to fix,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I have an idea.” She soldered something together. “Movement’s also power, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes?” I said, not seeing where she was going.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And you wanna be able to be zooming on your board, and then stop so you can take a shot, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes?” I felt a little stupid, still not getting exactly where she was going.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, I’m hooking it up so it just eats your movement and that powers the freezing,” Lana said, like it was simple and obvious. “And then when you want to unfreeze you get most of the movement back.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Huh.” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She clicked the box back together and stuck it back in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We finished repairing my hoverboard in record time. Especially for me. Working on my own, it would probably take me a week instead of a few hours.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Next up was Lana’s shotgun. It was mostly fine, just needing a few minor touch-ups we could take care of easily, but the grenade launcher module was unsalvageable.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck!” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I thought for a moment while Lana fretted over her shotgun. I said, “Does it have to launch the grenades?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana said, “Uh, yeah. What, you think I just wanna set them off at my feet?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pulled a couple bits and bobs out of my old work in progress pile, and brought them over. “I have some prototypes for an equipment teleporter. The thing I wanted to use them for is still under review, but I think it could help here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana was already detaching the old, destroyed parts. She said, “Teleporting grenades. I like it. And once they’re recharged, they can just teleport right back! Fuck yeah, thanks Chris.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We worked for a moment, then Lana said, “What were you gonna use this for, anyway?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I paused awkwardly. “Well, I was on an ADD med for a bit, at least until the side effects got bad. I could focus enough on it to really think. I built this giant cannon that would teleport itself out in chunks, but I still haven’t gotten it approved.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That sucks,” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck them for locking up your cannon like that,” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll help you build a better cannon, just to stick it to ‘em,” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” I said. “I used it once without permission, and it was powerful but it was also really imprecise? And with Crackle drawing fire like he does I feel like I’d wind up mostly just shooting him with it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana grunted. That was probably her way of conceding points.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My pistol was ruined. We could both tell. I could repair it, but it would probably be quicker to just pry the few bits that still worked out and make a new gun. We decided to table that for a bit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I caught Lana looking at her phone’s blank screen. “You want some help?” I asked. She tossed me the phone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn't that hard to fix up, really. It wasn't like making Tinkertech, which took forever to do. A couple quick replacements, a little distraction here and there, but it got done. I could do little things.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Here you go.” Lana was just leaning on a table, staring up at the ceiling.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She took it with a little, “Thanks.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You pretty much Tinkered out too?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think it’s just about lunchtime,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen for a moment, then stuffed it in a pocket. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go. It’s your turn to cook this time, though.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I have no clue how to cook,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll show you the ropes,” Lana said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The point was moot. There was already yakisoba in the fridge, with a little note in neat handwriting that said, “To: Kid Win, Recoil, and Roost. From Crackle. Enjoy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We did.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Chapter 14</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I was pretty much Tinkered out at that point, and Recoil had several days worth of missed texts to handle, so she headed off to the lounge while I headed off to my room.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Or, I was headed there, but then I spotted Roost. She was wandering about the base aimlessly, slowly turning her gaze on the squadron of exercising PRT troopers, on the jeeps  and helicopters and trucks, on the officers and logistics workers rushed to and fro.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wasn't sure how much I wanted to talk to her, but she had saved me yesterday, and leaving her alone to stew in her thoughts after a fight like that felt wrong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” I said, walking up to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She coughed, then turned to me. The bags under her eyes had lessened a little, but her eyes themselves looked a little vacant before they managed to focus on me. There was a pause, and then Roost said, “Fuck off.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry?” I said, taken a bit aback.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck off. You don't owe me shit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m serious! I saved your life. Big fucking deal. Occupational hazard.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, but...” I started, unsure how exactly to talk to her. “I wanted to make sure you were doing okay.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her eyes burned holes in my face. Something I said hit a nerve, judging by the way she balled her fists. It seemed like it was all she could do to not deck me then and there. “Fuck. Off.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Part of me wanted to just leave, and make her happy that way. But I didn’t. “It was a tough fight yesterday. I just wanted to talk.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“About the fight?” she hissed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“About anything. We haven't really talked.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.” It sounded angry, but she didn’t walk away, and her fists uncurled. Then she sat down crosslegged on the blacktop, and I followed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We both were silent for a moment, before Roost groaned and rocked back. “Fuck. Why even fucking do this, I don't know how to do this shit. I can’t talk.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I shrugged. “I dunno about that. Back in grade school, I had this friend. He’d always say he was shit at talking.’d stutter, or stumble over what he said, and then he’d just try to look mean enough they’d forget about it. Big guy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost grunted. Then she coughed, hard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We were in detention one time, right? And there was this girl sitting next to him that he thought was cool. So he tried to talk to her, and as usual, he messed it up. But instead of just being silent he kept going with it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like you, right now,” Roost said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Basically. Anyway, he kept going, and eventually he ran out of steam, right? And the girl looks at him and goes, ‘You’re an idiot, aren’t you,’ and you could just see him crumple.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And?” Roost said, impatience bleeding into her tone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well she looks over at him, and she said, ‘Man, I didn’t mean it like that. No shame in being an idiot. You think I’d be in here if I weren’t one?’ and they just kept talking, and the next day she comes out skating with us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t know, I just think it’s a nice story.” I leaned onto my back, using my hands as a pillow. “What you said just reminded me of it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What, you think I’m an idiot?” Roost scowled, starting to push herself to her feet. “Fuck, this was stupid. I don’t know, fucking, ugh.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “No, no, that’s not why. It’s like, he was worried about looking stupid, right? But he wound up getting all nervous about it talking to someone who didn’t care what he was.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost stopped, then warily sat back down. She stayed quiet for another moment. “So?” she said, finally.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pulled off my helmet. “So I’m Chris. Nice to meet you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looked down at my helmet, which still looked like crap, then at my face, and then she said, “No, fuck you, fuck this. I didn’t ask to be sent down to this shithole, and I’m sure as fuck not gonna bother making friends with the other dumbasses who were the only ones in the country to fuck up as badly as I did.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why not? Make the best of it, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No!” she yelled. “No, not make the fucking best of it! It’s gonna be six months, and then I’m never gonna see any of you assholes again, and-- and you probably are assholes, because you’re here, and I’m here, and I’m an asshole, and, fucking, fuck!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She breathed in, slowly, and out, slowly, and then she said, “And I don’t want my first friends to be people like me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck you,” Roost said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sat up. “We could keep in touch, you know. If we did become friends. Lana’s still in touch with a friend of hers back home.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lana?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Recoil.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, I still don’t want to,” Roost said. “It’s, just, fuck!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I let her take a moment for her own thoughts. Then she stood up. “Mahalia. Is my name. Suck a dick.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She walked off. I breathed out. Really, she didn’t seem awful. Besides, she seemed to think that punishments were a bad place to meet people, which I definitely didn’t think was true. Before I’d gotten my powers, that was where I’d met most of my friends. We hadn’t really kept in touch after I’d gotten transferred to Brockton Bay, but it was mostly my fault. Long hours Tinkering did my social life no favors.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I stood up, dusted myself off, and headed back to my room. Maybe Lana had the right idea. Maybe I should text around, try to get back in touch with some of them. With my body exercised out and my mind Tinkered out, something nice and sedentary would work wonders. Low effort, nothing but talking. Easy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was excited. I hadn’t talked to some of them in years, at this point. I’d be able to tell them all about...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Tinkering, mostly. It was weird. I couldn’t quite put my finger on anything else I really did at the moment. Tinkering and exercising. And video games and books, I guessed, but I hadn’t done either of those in weeks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Oh well.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Chapter 15</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Nobody had responded yet, but none of them had ever really been huge on social media anyway, so I was willing to wait for it. In the meantime, I slept, jogged at way-too-damn-early o’ clock, ate some cereal in the lounge because the cafeteria food could go choke on itself, and attended training.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Apparently Dendrite considered one day plenty of rest. Physical conditioning was, again, absolutely miserable, and considering my bruises and aches from two days ago hadn’t quite healed yet, I was lagging behind. Considering everyone else had similar bruises and aches, they lagged behind too. Even Crackle lagged behind, groaning and adjusting his arm and trying to move lightly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite took pity on us one round in, thank goodness. She sent us inside to an office room, where our PRT-appointed tutor would be ensuring that we didn’t fall behind on our studies while we were stationed here. There was an unspoken dread hanging in the air.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The teacher’s name was up on a whiteboard. Ms. Piriden. My mind danced through the possibilities of what she could be like. Strict, old, young, misguided, malicious, visions of hated teacher after hated teacher dancing through my skull.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I honestly couldn’t remember a teacher at any school I’d been to that I’d liked. If I had a piece of Tinkertech for every math teacher that scolded me for laziness, I’d be Armsmaster. If I had another piece for all the social studies teachers cross I’d gotten dates wrong, all the science teachers miffed at my botched measurements, and all the other teachers mad at me for being a ‘delinquent’ no matter what I was actually up to, I’d be Hero. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Judging by how everyone else looked, they had no love lost for teachers either.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil had her feet up on the desk, earbuds firmly in her ears, phone out. Crackle had already snapped a mechanical pencil in half by clenching his fists too hard around it. Roost was dead asleep the moment she hit her chair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The door opened, and a brightly colored dress with a little bit of human woman inside it entered. Ms. Piriden was young, walked with a spring in her step, had her hair in a ponytail, and I hated her already.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nice to meet you, class,” she said, in the smug voice all teachers seemed to have.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nobody said a word.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My name is Ms. Piriden, and I’ll be in charge of making sure you keep up with your studies during your internship.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You mean our punishment duty,” Crackle said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ms. Piriden smiled down at Crackle. “Now, I’d prefer to see your best efforts here. After all, if your grades aren’t  up to par I’ve been informed you will have plenty of chances to make them up in the evenings and on weekends. So, I’d prefer it if you all paid attention. It’ll make things easier on all of us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With that, she rapped on Roost’s desk, hard, and Roost jerked up, eyes wide and wild. “Get your rest at night, sweetheart,” she said. Roost hissed incoherently at her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She turned to Recoil. “And you-- “</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They’re Tinkertech earbuds. I can hear you fine. And they record your shit. So I should keep them in.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a barefaced lie. One that I wished I’d thought of. Listening to music through class would make things much, much more bearable. Wasn’t this place hellish enough without needing fucking school stacked on top of it?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you say so, dear. I’d just hate for you to have to spend your evenings here instead of enjoying yourself.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah. Same,” Recoil said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ms. Piriden walked over to her desk and removed a couple sheets of paper from it. “Now, your textbooks haven’t arrived on the base yet, so we’ll be working with worksheets for now. If anyone needs to borrow a pencil...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I stared down at the worksheet. Math. Of course it was fucking math. Of course the teacher wanted to start with the subject I was literally incapable of doing. Textbooks nothing, this woman didn’t even know who she was teaching.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I tuned out. It was the best way to deal with this kind of thing. I let my eyes wander, and my ears turn off, and simply watched as everyone else grumbled along through the lesson. Except for Crackle. Crackle finished his worksheet first, and then asked to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jealousy burned through me as I made marks at random on my paper. I took solace in the fact that at least the rest of the team was suffering too. Roost kept nodding off, and kept getting woken up rudely by Ms. Piriden, who seemed to blame her sleepiness on some sort of character flaw instead of the fact that she almost died recently. Recoil, meanwhile, was getting asked the brunt of the questions, as the teacher tested the limits of her earbuds and her patience. I could see her fuming more and more as time went on.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But the worst part of all was the way Ms. Piriden said, “I’ll see you all tomorrow,” at the end of class. As soon as we could without getting caught, we all flipped the bird in the classroom’s direction.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay, what’s worse. The evil robot monsters we’re here to fight, or school?” Recoil asked me, hands in her pockets.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“School,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“At least we can blow up the robots,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You hungry?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Me too. Let’s go get food.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goal: 19626</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dinner was a solemn affair. I figured having an actual goddamn class after almost dying was cause for a quiet dinner, and Recoil seemed to agree. We just sat there, eating leftover cafeteria pizza that Recoil had wisely stowed away in the fridge.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do we really have to go tomorrow, too?” Recoil muttered, at one point.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I guess so.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fuck.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil gulped down a big bit of pizza and said venomously, “Some of us didn’t get a fancy education growing up.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I arched an eyebrow at her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She glared at me, “Yeah, I know, makes me sound like some podunk hillbilly, but t’ain’t my fault my parents took the Shrek approach to homeowning.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You lived in a swamp?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil’s glare turned away. I didn’t press further.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Another bit of silence stretched before my phone buzzed. It was in my hands in a heartbeat. I could feel my mood light up as soon as I saw the name.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, sweet!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who is it?” Recoil asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Val, one of my old skating buddies. Wasn’t expecting to hear from her this soon.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Kickass.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was already texting, to find out what was up with her. “Yeah, we were tight in grade school. Lost touch when, uh...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“When you started dealing with cape shit?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I could see it so clearly. All of us kicking around together in the skate park by my house under the summer sun. Gliding back in from another failed shot at a hardflip, spotting Val resting on the ground with Max standing over her. Flash a grin, come to a stop in front of them, take the chance to shoot the shit. Talking for the sake of it. Then good ol’ Kyle rolls up, flips the bird at me, and we’re all up and tearing through the park trying to outdo him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The motion, the wind in my hair, the feeling of landing clean, everyone skating together down the street. I missed it. I always held out a little hope that while out patrolling, I’d pull a trick and someone from the old crew would spot me and say hey. It had never happened, but I still hoped.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What’s she saying?” Recoil asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ah, just asking what I’ve been up to.” I paused, my thumbs over the keyboard. A doubt was buzzing between my ears. Was it really okay to tell her the truth? The cover story was an out-of-town internship, but Val wouldn’t buy that from me for a second.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re not gonna actually tell her, are you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean, it’s Val.” I looked up at Recoil. “She never blabbed when I shoplifted, she showed me the tags she made, we-- “</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You shoplifted?” Recoil sounded surprised.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I— yeah. Before I got powers. I mean, gotta stick it it to the man, right?” I gave a lopsided grin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil gave me a weird look. “Really? You? You always seemed like a fuckin— like a goody-two-shoes. Model hero and shit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I shrugged. “I mean, I try to be that now. Being a Ward means a decent paycheck, I wasn’t going to throw that out the window because I didn’t feel like paying for a thing of trading cards.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil looked down at her plate, now bereft of pizza. “I’m gonna go grab more,” she said. “You want some?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, could you grab me a slice?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil nodded, and walked over to the fridge with a thoughtful expression on her face. I turned back to my phone and made a decision.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, I’m a cape now,” I texted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>No response was forthcoming. I kicked back to wait. Recoil slapped another piece of pizza in front of me, not meeting my eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked up at her. “Hey, if this is about me shoplifting, I don’t steal any more. So you don’t have to worry about that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil sat back down across from me. “No, it’s not that. I just— were you poor?” The question came out of her mouth and she immediately seemed to regret it. “Fuck, I’m sorry, that’s a shitty thing to ask—“</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah. Broke-ass kid of a broke-ass family.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil blinked. “Oh. Okay. I just— I know what that’s like.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t push for details, and Recoil didn’t offer any. That was fine, really. Nobody liked talking about that kind of thing. Certainly not my old crew. We had each other, we could get by if we needed to.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Like when Andy’s— </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ugh, fuck!” Recoil said, cutting my thought short.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I opened my mouth to ask what happened, but she was already continuing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m really fucking sorry. For calling you that shit, when you weren’t.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A goody-two-shoes? That’s not an issue. Besides, I pretty much am now.” I gave her a placating shrug.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That doesn’t mean it’s okay to just call you shit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s fine.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s not fine! It’s shitty!” Recoil stood up. Then she caught herself, and sat back down, and put a hand on her face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lana...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I told myself I’d stop doing that shit. Fuck.” Recoil said it quietly, into her hand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I took another bite of cold pizza, and let her sit there. I figured she needed a second for herself. When she didn’t uncover her face by the time I finished the slice, I spoke up. “Look, you don’t have to beat yourself up over it. You apologized, you’re trying to do better, that’s plenty.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She made a little groaning noise. Then her phone buzzed, and she slowly uncovered her hands. She checked, and got up, and walked to the door.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll be down in the Tinker bay in like an hour,” she said quietly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll see you there,” I said. Then she left, and I just sat there, trying to figure out what to do. It was tough to figure out, I could still feel that buzz of excitement from hearing from Val bouncing around in my chest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then my phone buzzed, and I was up and pacing with my phone in my hand before I’d told my body to do anything of the sort.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The message from Val made my brain stop for a minute.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No shit? Me too!”</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Chapter 16</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I didn’t wind up telling Val who I was. She didn’t mention who she was, either. Knowing we were both capes now was plenty. She did mention that she’d moved, not long after we lost touch, and that was why she hadn’t been at the skate park. I had to tell her that I hadn’t really been by the skate park lately, because I was a cape now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That gave her pause, and made me shift uncomfortably in my seat. Her eventual message asked if I’d at least kept in touch with the rest of the crew, because she really wanted to know how they were doing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I said I hadn’t. There was a little bubble of unfamiliar guilt in there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Val said, “Chris, listen. I saw how you got when you first got into the technical tricks, I saw how you got when I showed you how to tag, I saw how you got when Andy got you into cape fanboying. I need you to be real with me here. Did you lose contact with them because your next thing was caping?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t say anything in response. It didn’t feel like I’d paused for that long, but no matter what it felt like the minutes refused to stop slipping. I debated saying a thing came up and going to tinker with Recoil. Tinkering was stressful, but at least I was— </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The next text came then. Val said, “Look, you texted me. Are you at least texting them now?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” I sent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you eating okay?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sleeping and shit?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you in over your head with cape shit? Because I can come help if you need me to. Ain’t nothing tying me down.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m fine,” I sent her, “Really, you don’t gotta look out for me so hard, we’re not kids anymore.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“From what you haven’t been telling me, I think I gotta look out for you harder now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I typed up another text, then paused over the send button. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to send it. Not because I wasn’t sure I could trust her with the information. This was Val. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know what she’d think of me being a hero. A Ward. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m a Ward now. I have so many people looking out for me right now I don’t know what to do.” Which was true. Even if I was in Eagleton now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Wait. You. Chris ‘let’s go tag the fucking Boardwalk’ Griffin. Are a Ward.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” I texted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like, a kiddie patrol hero-in-training-wheels.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What the fuck.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s a steady paycheck! And one I don’t need to lie to my parents about! And it makes Tinkering way easier!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re a Tinker?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked. Uh oh. Would that— </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re Kid Win? The actual, honest to god, dorky toothless loser Kid Win?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Holy fuck I saw your hoverboard stunt reel a couple months back it was insane.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I breathed out a sigh of relief. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, your wiki page says you were temporarily transferred. You aren’t in town right now?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Uh, no.” Why did Val have to be so damn on point all the time. She was figuring out way more out about me than I really had intended to tell her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Where are you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just, like, a training camp.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The one in San Diego?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not allowed to say.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was another long stretch of silence. I realized, belatedly, that my legs had gotten me up of their own accord and were pacing me around the room in a restless frenzy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Val, luckily, didn’t wind up asking me a question I really, really didn’t want to answer. The last thing I wanted was for Val to be within spitting distance of the Machine Army. If something happened to her, I’d...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t know what I would do, but it would probably be bad.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, look. I gotta go for a bit, but drop me a line if you need help, k?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sent an okay hand emoji back to her and briefly debated sitting down and trying to breathe. I checked my phone. I’d only been talking to her for twenty-five minutes, but it felt like it had been both longer and shorter at the same time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Tinker bay. I should go there. It’d be nice to relax and start figuring out how to replace my trashed pistol, even if Recoil wouldn’t be there for another half hour or so. I made a beeline for it, as though something would catch up to me if I didn’t. What that something might have been, I had no idea, but it felt ominous.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Like sirens starting under heavy rain.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When I arrived down in the Tinker bay, I was surprised to find Recoil already sitting there, sourly soldering away. She didn’t look up as I entered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, Recoil.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You good?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wasn’t sure of how true that was, but if she’d asked me the same I would have answered the same, so I let it slide. If it was an issue she’d probably bring it up during our Tinker session, anyway.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How’s Val doing?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She’s pretty good. It, uh, turns out she’s a cape.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Should you really be telling me that?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sat down next to her. “Probably not, but oh well. I can trust you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil didn’t say anything for a long while, so I took my pistol out from under the worktable and started to try and chip away at the melted and burned out innards to find anything that still worked. There wasn’t much. Most of the stuff that was left was in the back of the pistol, away from the barrel. My hands were aching a little by the time I’d gotten as much as I’d cared to salvage from it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I had no idea what to do for my next weapon. Maybe just another pistol. Pistols were easy. I could concentrate long enough to do that, at least.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You like her?” Recoil asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like a friend?” I wasn’t really paying total attention to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like a crush.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I held up a panel to the light, to see if the scorch marks were only superficial. “Nah. I mean, like, we were each others’ first kiss, but we both agreed it was weird. Tight-knit, but not in that way.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” Recoil said, quietly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why do you ask?” I reached for another piece. This one seemed fine. I wondered if I should be inventorying them, then realized there’d be no way I could hold my focus on an itemized list long enough to make it, let alone use it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just curious.” Recoil said it forcefully enough that I turned from my pile of still-good junk to look at her. She was glaring down at her soldering iron like it had personally offended her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t have to feel weird for asking. I’m the one who was talking about her.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil’s glare didn’t lessen, but she grunted something which might have been assent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Anyway,” I continued, trying to take her mind off whatever about that exchange had soured her. “I need some help.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“New gun time?” Now her glare was softening plenty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“New gun time.”</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Chapter 17</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I had my notebook out and was loosely trying to sketch ideas in it. Recoil was poking through the pile of salvage from my pistol. Neither of us said anything for a moment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked over my sketches. Most of them were pistols. Much as a rocket launcher would be wonderful against the Machine Army, getting it actually built and approved wouldn’t exactly go great for me. Even if I could concentrate on it long enough to put it together, I’d also have to make ammunition for it. Which would take a lot of time doing a repetitive task. Which meant it was a bad idea.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil peered over at me. I pointed at one of the pistol designs. “What do you think of this?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re making another pistol?” She sounded vaguely disappointed, somehow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Probably, yeah. Pistols are easy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her eyes scanned the notebook, looking at the sloppy pictures I had scattered across these two pages. She said, “You’d have more room to work in a bigger gun.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s just a gun,” I said, then immediately regretted it as Recoil spun to face me. I involuntarily leaned away from her intensity.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just a gun? That gun is going to save your fucking life out there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked away. “Yeah, okay. That’s... yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil huffed. “I don’t know why you’re sticking to some shitty pistol when you could go for something way better. A machine gun, or something. Something with enough room in it to fit some cool shit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I bit my lip. “I don’t know if I could...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She groaned. “Kid, listen. You need a real weapon. Something that can handle taking on the Machine Army. You’re a great Tinker, but I don’t care how great you are, a pistol ain’t gonna cut it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Leaving aside the obviously false idea that I was somehow good at Tinkering, she did have a bit of a point. The main issue being what I would actually be able to use on a hoverboard. “The other reason pistols are good is that they’re small, and easy to use on my hoverboard. I don’t know if I could even really use anything else.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil hummed. “I mean, we made your hoverboard be able to stop, right? So, really, you can have a stable surface to shoot from pretty much anywhere.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I guess. We still need to test if it works.” Not that I didn’t trust Recoil’s work. It was my own work I didn’t trust.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, how about a rifle? Like we can still make you a sidearm, I guess, in case you need it, but you could do so much more with a rifle.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What would I even put in it?” I really had no idea. Nothing solid, anyway. I only had scraps of ideas bouncing against each other and slowly floating out of my brain.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I could show you what I’ve got in my gun, and how it works and shit.” She sounded conflicted, looking away as she said it. I was tempted to tell her, no, it was fine, but then she picked her gun up from the table beside her and I remembered how incredible the monster of a thing looked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The way the sweeping welded curves gave way to blocky ammo-storage boxes, the way the barrels had clearly been worked and reworked and re-reworked over the years she’d had it. The size of it, with a grenade launcher attachment and a series of patchwork extensions to the body of the gun to likely cram in even more tech, the vents and shock-absorbers and ports and status icons on the stock.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The excitement raced down into my fingertips and burned there. I wanted to see what was inside. With my hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil, seeing my expression, said, “Just let me know if you’ve got questions,” and began to solemnly take a series of very mismatched screws out. Pieces of the shotgun started to come off: the grenade launcher, the targeting laser, the ammo boxes. Finally, she grunted and started to remove the last few bits hiding the innards from my prying eyes, and I got to see what she’d installed. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>If anything, the inside of the gun was even more iterated upon, even more patchwork. Not just her own tech, either. I could see salvaged pieces of unfamiliar-looking systems tucked snugly in alongside the very Recoil bits and pieces, all hooked in and hooked up. I looked closer, and then paused.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It looked like there was a bone hooked into the gun, too. Wedged into the trigger mechanism. I couldn’t quite tell how the mechanism worked overall, but worse still I couldn’t tell what the bone was from. I pointed at it. “Is that...?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil looked. “Oh, that old alligator bone. Yeah. I’ve swapped out most of the alligator stuff, but that bone is actually pretty much exactly what my trigger needed. I haven’t found a single thing that does its job better.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Alligator stuff?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her face turned thoughtful for a moment as the turned my question over in her mind. I could see her jaw working a little bit as she thought. Then she said, “It’s what I had to Tinker with when I was getting out of the swamp.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh.” I wasn’t sure if she wanted to say more, so I stopped there, but she continued on anyway.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean, it was those motherfuckers or me, you know? And I could only use the tree bark for so much. So I started using them. Against themselves. Kinda funny, really.” Her face was a mask of humorless stone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I nodded. It sounded— </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It took me fucking forever to get better parts, and then I got snatched up by the PRT when they caught me in a burned-out RV, because of course I did, and I almost tried to fight my way out, but...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil made a face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The stuff they promised me. No more scraps. How the fuck could I say no to that?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And, fuck, getting transferred to Portland was ten kinds of fucked, but at least some good came out of that.” She looked down at herself as she said it, and then she put her stuff down on the table and wrapped her arms around herself, and I wasn’t exactly sure what to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And you met someone cool there,” I offered, remembering our conversation the other day.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Recoil said. She took a deep breath in. “She was the one who really, like, showed me how fucked I was. And that I could fix it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I couldn’t quite parse the tone with which Recoil said it, save for the fact that it had enough gravity to drag down the moon. I debated giving her a hug, then decided against it. I got the feeling she didn’t like to be touched.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then Recoil coughed, and sat up, and rubbed at her eyes, and said, “But, whatever. Shit happens. Let me give you the grand tour.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her words were back to their usual, but I couldn’t help but notice that her eyes were blank. Not looking totally at the gun, never totally looking at me, always just a little bit somewhere else.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Chapter 18</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I hummed, staring at the bits and pieces of the rifle laid out in front of me. The... the Something Rifle. It needed a name. Even if naming your weapons was dorky, and Dennis had ribbed me about it more than once.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Maybe I should look in the news more. I had been avoiding it lately. I didn’t want to find an obituary. It was a silly fear, maybe. The Wards weren’t exactly pushed out to the front lines all the time, but...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So,” Recoil said, with a yawn. “You think it’ll work for now?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I bit my lip and started slotting it together. “I mean, maybe. We’ll see, I guess.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was strange. Usually, when I put something like this together, it was like pulling teeth. And usually resulted in something that blew up in my face. But with Recoil helping me out, and with her shotgun to use for ideas, and with boxes and boxes of my old forgotten spare parts and the old forgotten spare parts of every Tinker who had come through Eagleton at my disposal, that maybe, just maybe, it might work.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was more elegant-looking than Recoil’s shotgun was. Smoother, with neat little space-age curves. Matching my usual red and gold aesthetic. It was a little darker than my armor, a burgundy instead of a real red and a less bright or shiny gold, but it wasn’t as though I had all the usual materials I did back home. And it looked good.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I’d stolen the idea for a control panel from my last pistol, may it rest in pieces, but at Recoil’s behest I had it unfold from the top of the gun instead of sitting on the side, so it was easier to use while aiming. And I hooked it into my fixed-up visor, so I could control it without needing to use my hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It fired shots more similar to my new pistol too, but they were tighter this time. Better yet, Recoil had helped me design it so that as shots were fired, excess energy from creating and tightening up those bolts would be channeled into the stock, where they would be stored in a battery and could be used for more defensive and scattered bursts to give me time to get away and let my gun’s power bank recharge.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was simple, really, as Tinkertech went. We hadn’t tried to improve it with anything big or groundbreaking just yet. But my notebook had been filled with ideas, and I was practically blurring with excitement to get to some of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Should we test it? If it’s shit to use on your hoverboard, we oughta know now so we can start working on something new tomorrow.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I nodded, and picked up the gun with one arm, and my hoverboard with the other. Recoil followed me out to the little firing range on base.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had started to rain outside outside. Not that I hadn’t remembered to waterproof my tech. Well, not that Recoil hadn’t remembered to remind me to waterproof my tech. It would make it a little harder to aim, though. Whatever. It was only a test.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was only rain. Why was my heart beating so fast?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite was hurrying past, a phone firmly pressed against her ear by a tentacle as the rest of them formed a makeshift umbrella over her head. She was making no effort to be quiet, and so Recoil and I were treated to a small slice of what she had been saying.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“—warn us before they’re that close! There’s almost been a breach to the south, and if you’d let me know sooner we could have gotten something temporary rigged up there! No, sending them would be a terrible idea, we already had to mobilize—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then she was out of earshot. Recoil and I shared a worried glance, and walked at a slightly brisker pace to the testing range. Whatever that was didn’t sound good, and I’d rather not be caught weaponless when it happened.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The dirt track to the shooting area was mud by the time we made it. Recoil didn’t seem to mind, her boots being just about sturdy enough to hold back an ocean. Mine were, you know, doing a decent job. And, more importantly, I had really good socks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>People were always sour about getting socks from their grandmothers for some reason, but my grandma always sent the best goddamn socks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, it didn’t stop me from taking to the air as soon as we reached the place. I zipped around on my board a bit, getting a feel for the slight changes the repairs had made to it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil called up to me, “Don’t fall and die! Or explode!” That was reassuring.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I tried a simple ollie, just to see if I’d managed to get the thing under control, and when that worked I started doing more complicated tricks. Then I heard Recoil make an impressed whistle, and I stopped. No point in showing off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Time to test the important things.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>First was just firing the gun. It would be harder to get a good shot with the new rifle while I was in motion, and I didn’t want to rely on it, but I was going to need to know how, at least. I did a couple quick figure-eights, building up speed, and snapped off a couple shots.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The bolts were a lot faster than my other pistols, which was helpful. I still missed all the shots I took, but that was pretty expected. More importantly, Recoil’s suggestions for automatic recoil compensation in my hoverboard and armor was right on the money.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then I had to test the really important thing. The board freeze-and-fire.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I got up to speed. I needed to be going pretty fast to be able to even use the board freeze, which was understandable but inconvenient. Finally, though, my HUD gave me the green light, and I activated it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And almost went tumbling out to the ground ten feet below me. Only my mag-lock shoes saved me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Okay. Brace myself better before freezing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I took a shot. This one hit. Much easier than when I was moving. Sadly, I only had time for one shot before my hoverboard jerked, and I nearly dropped the rifle. I flailed a bit, trying not to flip myself, and finally managed to get my stance on the board back in order.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You good?” I heard Recoil call.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fine. I’m fine!” I called back, even though my heart was hammering in my ears. I spiralled down, landing. That was enough testing for one day.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Everything work okay?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” I said. “Now I just have to learn how to use it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She punched my lightly in the shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That’s when the announcement went out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“All Wards, report to the courtyard immediately,” it said. Then it went silent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was just rain. That wasn’t why we were being called. It was too soon. It couldn’t be that. It just couldn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I ran to the courtyard as though Leviathan himself was on my heels.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Chapter 19</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Dendrite looked at the four of us. Bedraggled, soaked, miserable in the rain.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost spoke. “We’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>what?</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re understaffed,” Dendrite said. “Trust me, fielding you against villains is never my first choice, but we can’t allow them access to the Machine Army. If they broke quarantine, the entire region could go down in flames.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I nodded, my throat dry, my fists clenched.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Keep in mind, this is still voluntary. Especially since some of you are still recovering from your last mission, so—” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna do it,” Roost huffed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Let’s stick it to those fuckers,” Recoil said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m in,” Crackle said</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just tell us where we need to be,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite gestured. “That truck. Let’s get moving. There’s not a lot of time before they get here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Details were supplied to us on the way. This was a small but somewhat locally notorious villain group called Steamroll, one consisting of two tough Brutes and a Tinker with a giant mech. Gritter, Arvee, and Roadblock. Tough customers. I lamented that my gun didn’t have a good high power mode yet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost seemed surprisingly excited when she heard this. She grinned ear to ear and tried to crack her knuckles. Only one of them did, but that didn’t seem to deter her one bit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked at Recoil, who was taking stock of the grenades she had. She was also flipping panels in them open, working hard on last-minute adjustments, likely to try and give them enough oomph to affect Brutes. I left her to it. It would probably be a good idea for me to do the same to my rifle, but I didn’t think I could concentrate. They were fielding me against real villains!</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crackle was blank. Just sitting there, staring into space. An occasional bit of electricity ran down his arm.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I couldn’t sit still. I pulled my phone out from its little case in my armor and texted Val. “Gonna go fight some villains, wish me luck!” She didn’t text back, but she had said she was busy, so I wasn’t too worried.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My attention drifted. My foot tapped against the floor of the truck. My gun was stowed behind me, then next to me, then on my lap, then on my hoverboard on my lap, and then next to me again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Real villains!</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was dangerous, sure. Not that they would be likely to kill us, but it was still dangerous. At the same time, though, it felt nice that I was actually getting fielded. That Dendrite didn’t just think I’d get myself killed. That I was actually doing proper caping.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That I would be using my new, untested, unnamed rifle in live combat, and Dendrite hadn’t even mentioned putting it through some sort of screening process.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The rifle was suddenly very, very heavy. As heavy as the Alternator Cannon, and just as untested, and just as unapproved. My mouth was dry. My brain slowly started to fill up with the many, many things that could go wrong with it. Lethal blasts, explosions, jams, battery failures, heat venting malfunctions, terrible scenario after terrible scenario began to unfold in my head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey. You ready?” Recoil asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I smashed my thoughts using the power of pre-doom small talk. “Yeah. I think so.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Your rifle kicked all sorts of ass at the shooting range.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wasn’t so sure. I hadn’t even managed to snap off a proper freeze-and-fire, which would be the only thing that would make my rifle remotely usable for anything except a spray of lightshow over anything I wasn’t aiming at. It could still break. It probably would still break. My tech never worked right first try.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil gave me a cocky grin. “Let’s show some villains who’s boss.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then again, it wasn’t just my tech. Recoil had been there, really been there. Armsmaster was...a mentor, but we tended to work in parallel at best. Compare notes. Look at each other’s stuff. This was teamwork. Real teamwork. Working together on the same piece of tech. And not just with anyone, it was Recoil who’d put the work in. If anyone could make one of my guns work...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” I said, and held out my fist to bump.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She bumped it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The truck stopped, and we piled out. We were by a roadside, paved, cracked, and abandoned. Roost was already rubbing her hands together as she stepped out onto the pavement, the ground already starting to run under her feet. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite nodded to Roost as the truck drove a little ways off to park. There were other PRT troopers here, setting up a little makeshift roadblock. Though, if there was a mech Tinker and two Brutes inbound, I wasn’t sure how useful it would be against anything except for cover from us firing at each other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The comms crackled to life, and Dendrite said, “Kid Win, in the air. See if you can spot them coming. Crackle, cover Roost. Recoil, behind the barricade.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil opened her mouth to protest as I rocketed up, but then she looked at Dendrite. At the way her tentacles were fractalizing, spreading out over the roadside, covering the ground in front of her. At the way sparks danced along the tentacles as they spread. At the grim look on Dendrite’s face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With Recoil behind the barricade, lookout was up to me. It was funny. I’d never really thought about it, but being up high on my hoverboard was a little like being on console duty. Keeping an eye on the fight, telling people where things might be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was something on the horizon. I squinted at it, but my visor’s zoom function was still on the fritz after our last bout with the Machine Army. It took precious minutes for it to start resolving into something identifiable.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What do you see, Kid Win?” Dendrite asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I see... the mecha. I think that maybe,” I swallowed. “Maybe you should have warned us about how big it was.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Because there was the mecha. Skating on a pair of stolen cars at breakneck speed. Heading straight for us.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My rifle suddenly felt very small.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Chapter 20</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I was very quickly reminded of why I hated fighting villains, Brutes in particular. Since I was the only one up in the air, Dendrite yelled for me to go after the giant mecha. Roadblock. The mecha Tinker was Roadblock.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was easy to see why they called themselves that. My bolts just bounced off the mech’s armor, looking for all the world like I wasn’t affecting it in the slightest. Worse yet, I’d found out the hard way that dancing in and out of the mecha’s range was not going to work. It didn’t appear at first glance to have anything ranged, but then the massive murder-piston behind the thing’s wrists punched out, and I very nearly got splattered. Only a panicked burst of speed on my hoverboard saved me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The burst of speed had saved my life, but it had killed a battery.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>What little glimpses of the battle below I could spot told me that these villains weren’t pulling their punches, either. Which made sense in a way, breaking S-Class containment was already a big enough taboo that killing kids was more of an afterthought than anything else.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil was unloading her shotgun at Gritter, an annoying weaselly figure coated in slippery muddy white slushy goo. He was skating around her, making tracks of gross gunk as each blast splattered gunk everywhere and sent him skidding across the road. I could see Recoil trying to angrily brush the gunk off her coat, but she was getting sluggish, her movements slower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Over on the other side of the road, Crackle and Dendrite were trying to fend off Arvee; a massive leathery dark green Changer in a hoodie stretched to its breaking point. Behind the two of them, Roost was charging, taking her time, the road flowing up into her faster and faster. Fast enough that I could see the transport truck we’d ridden in beginning to melt too. Nobody else noticed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Roost!” I yelled into the comms. “You’re melting the truck!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite groaned, struggling under the weight of Arvee pounding on her tentacle wall. “We have more trucks.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost’s radius kept growing. I twisted to let my hoverboard’s emergency repulsion panels shove me out of the way of a coming fist. Roost would help us fix things when she was finished, but until then, we were slowly being drained. Me of power, Recoil of mobility, Dendrite and Crackle of endurance in the face of a murderously strong Brute.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something needed to change.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I ran through what I had with me as I weaved around the giant murderous metal fists. I had a gun. I could power it up, but at full strength I’d be mostly out of juice. I had armor that would crumple like tinfoil. I had a hoverboard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A hoverboard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A hoverboard that could pull a Clockblocker.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I grit my teeth. Betting my own tech against a Tinker like this was a fool’s bet, but it wasn’t just my own tech, was it. It was Recoil’s too, and Clock’s, and a little bit of Armsmaster’s. If I couldn’t trust myself, I could trust them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I flew back. I needed a clean shot at this. I needed them to put the full piston power into this punch. I needed to have enough momentum to use the freeze. I needed to make this work in one shot, because I wouldn’t have the power for another one. I needed to, ideally, not die in the process.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At any rate, Roadblock seemed to be happy to oblige. She wound up a vicious twenty-ton punch to smack me out of the air for trying to flee, and as soon as it launched, the piston roaring outwards with a noise that crushed the concerned shouts of my allies on the ground, I spunn and charged straight back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And skimmed my legs up forward, riding an invisible halfpipe.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And froze the board just as the punch closed in, filling my vision with certain death.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And felt the rush of wind as it crunched against the timelocked board, enough to nearly blow me off despite the lock on my boots as well. And heard the twisting and snapping and popping and screaming of metal, and the shocked fizzes of electronics, and watched as the impact against an unyielding force dented the fist inward with the push of the piston.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Panels ripped, and tore, and the dark interior of the mech’s innards beckoned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I turned the power up on my rifle, stuck it in one of the holes, and fired it. Every crack in the fist glowed with red-orange light. There was an explosion a million miles away at the wrist, and then another, and then another.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The fights below paused to look up at me as the piston began to retract, leaving the broken-off fist hanging there against my board. I nudged it with the butt of the rifle, and it teetered, and creaked, and began to fall with agonizing slowness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Everyone below scattered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The fist splashed down into the puddle of road Roost was creating, and over her comms came a shocked gasp. Bits of hardening asphalt rained over everyone below, splattered against the mech’s knees. Then the gasp turned into an, “Oh, yes!” and the fist began to melt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My helmet bleeped at me angrily about being low on power. My board unfroze. I shot upward and over Roost’s radius, crashing painfully down against the asphalt. My helmet beeped more urgently, but it really didn’t need to. Pain was already a wonderful indicator of where my armor had failed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Gritter skated over to me. “Well, what do we have here? Little punk pushed a little too hard?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked up at him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He drew back his leg and kicked me in the ribs. Yeah, that bit of armor was definitely broken. And possibly the ribs themselves, too. I screamed, and my handy dandy helmet turned my comms off before I deafened everyone in earshot.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My eyes drifted over to Recoil, slathered in goop, moving to aim her gun at Gritter in slow motion. Slow enough that he could just skate out of the way. My eyes drifted to Crackle, in the process of being knocked clean off his feet by Arvee, his body crackling like a Tesla coil. My eyes drifted to Dendrite, having wrapped her arms around Roadblock’s legs, trying to keep the mecha from joining the fray.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I did have one last piece of tech I hadn’t used. Barely tech. Just a toy, really. An afterthought. Speakers in my armor i could use to amplify my voice if I needed to, say, calm a crowd.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I also had an SD card in my helmet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, tried to be the hero I wasn’t,” I said, ignoring the protesting of my body. Gritter paused as he wound up for another savage kick. “Might as well go out like the punk I am. Helmet, play </span>
  <em>
    <span>Girl All The Bad Guys Want</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was dumb, maybe. But I hadn’t heard the song in forever. Maybe going out to Aleph pop punk was a little silly. But I couldn’t help but feel there was something funny about it as Gritter kicked me again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My eyes closed from the pain. Trying to be a tough guy, yeah. No rap metal for me, that was never really my thing, but failing miserably, again and again, I definitely— </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a crash, and a painful splattering noise. I cracked my eyes open.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Roost was standing over me, one fist out, boxer style. On the chest of Roadblock’s mech was a very large splatter of goo, and Gritter, stuck there by his arms and legs and own power. Flattened by the knockout punch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Creamin’ all the tough guys. Fuck yeah.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a silent whoosh of wind, and then Arvee was slamming into Roost with enough force to knock me backwards. I rolled. My arm rested on the melted divot of road that Roost had absorbed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The two of them began to fight like only true-blue Brutes could. Every impact shook the ground. Every clash felt like it would shatter my eardrums. Every bit of movement blurred to the point where I could barely keep track of it all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Was Roost even winning? It was hard to make out through the overcast sky of pain in my mind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They paused, by some unbroken agreement. Broke apart. Roost was panting heavily. Arvee didn’t seem winded. Roost was dripping liquid asphalt and gooey melted Tinkertech. Black blood stained Arvee’s hoodie.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a very loud gunshot. Arvee exploded, then unexploded, then re-exploded, then went flying. Recoil, who had just finished lining up a shot. Who Arvee hadn’t been paying attention to.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The song ended. Slowly, I looked over at Roadblock.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Where my gun had found no purchase, Dendrite’s tentacles had burrowed in easily. Taking advantage of the mech’s missing arm, she’d managed to keep out of reach while burrowing her tentacles into the mech’s legs, stopping it from moving, stopping it from running. Pulses of electricity ran the length of Dendrite’s limbs, and Roadblock began to seize, then to topple forward.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I got to my feet, an inch at a time. I could see the downed Crackle, off to one side, doing the same. The goop began to slough off Recoil, and Roost’s melted everything was already cascading off her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dendrite murmured something into her headset. I didn’t catch it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We all started walking towards each other. Crackle, passing by Arvee’s body, stomped on their face viciously. I winced, but Arvee had more than proven they could take things like that. And I could at least agree with making sure they wouldn’t get back up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We met in the middle. If you ignored the bruises, the cuts, the dents, and the expressions, we almost looked like we hadn’t just been through hell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The rain had become just a drizzle. I wondered when it had done that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We did it,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nobody said anything. Somewhere behind us, there was a screech of tires. The PRT Troopers were here.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We did it,” I said it again, more to myself. Just to taste the words in my mouth. We had done it. We had. We. Myself included.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then my vision swam, and I collapsed.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Chapter 21</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>I woke up, sort of.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My mind was a hazy, messy, pain med addled fog. My body felt fuzzy around the edges. My eyes didn’t want to open, and I didn’t feel like putting the effort into making them. Instead, I just let my mind wander.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wandered to the song that was still stuck in my head. The song that had been there in my memory ever since those nights out skating with everyone, way past sunset. Popping the album into the boombox, skipping to track three, time to skate with a girl a little cooler than me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Girl All The Bad Guys Want was my favorite track to skate to, and even of Val always gave me shit over my predilection for angry white boy music, she’d still skate along with me and sing along. She wasn’t, like, a fan, but every song was better with your crew. Even if I couldn’t sing for shit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Val. I missed Val. I’d been missing her a long time, but being out here, talking to her again, it really hammered home just how much I’d been missing her company. And it was funny that after so long apart, talking to her felt as easy and natural as when we spent the afternoon in detention coming up with ever more ridiculous things BFF could stand for.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Battle Forged Firebrands was what we’d decided on. Not because it was silly, but because we felt it fit us. It was more our style than anything else.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A slow trickle of pain began to leak in around my chest, and my thoughts began to scatter. My eyes opened. I groaned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The medbay. Not surprising. At least I wasn’t here after losing a fight. Or worse, after messing something up on my hoverboard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, shit, you’re awake.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was Lana, no mask, still in her scuffed-up coat, her shotgun propped up next to her. She didn’t look hurt. That was good.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Uh, yeah.” I blinked once, then again for good measure. “Is something up?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looked away. “No. Well. Sorta.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked again. “Uh, okay. I feel kinda drugged to the gills right now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s— whatever, I can say it later. It’s not a huge thing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” I shook my head, feeling my brain rattle. “I just mean, if I’m like, giving off weird vibes. Or something.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So what’s the thing?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Recoil coughed awkwardly. “And, I just want to say that if you’re an ass about this I won’t fucking forgive you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay.” I might have been on drugs, but not being an ass was something I could do pretty easily. Just think about what Sophia would do, then do literally anything else. Easy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And I’m only telling you because it’d be fucked up if something happened and you didn’t know. I want you to know.” It occurred to me that she seemed really small. That it had never been something I’d thought about but she was the shortest of the four of us there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m— I’m genderbent. And if you have a fuckin’ problem with that, then, fuck you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I put her vehement words and hesitant tone aside as matters for the future. “Genderbent? What? Like, did a cape...”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She glared at me. “Fuck off. I used to be a guy, and now I’m not being a guy, and I don’t need you fucking—” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked. “You’re trans?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She blinked back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like, genderbent is a fanfiction term. Max would have fucking killed anyone who called them genderbent.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana began to flush. “But, fuck, Sara always said it like it was just the right word.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sara?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana looked away. And coughed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up like that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s cool.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I keep fucking doing that to you! It’s shitty!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I dropped it. My brain was too hazed for me to properly respond. Lana glared down at the floor until her cheeks stopped being red.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sara was the one I was talking about,” she said, in a much calmer voice. “The one who showed me how fucked up I was. How I wasn’t living like me, just staying the way I thought things had to be. Shitty. And she told me that I could just be a girl instead, and stop feeling all that gross shit that came with people calling me a guy and giving me shit about my hair and,” her hands went up to mess with a couple stray strands of her hair. “It was better. I was being me, but a better me. A more me-er me, I guess.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I smiled at her. “I like the you-er you a lot.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lana’s blush returned in full force. “Anyway, that was the thing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The drugs in my system stretched the ensuing silence like taffy. Lana didn’t seem like she wanted to move, and words were entirely beyond my mental capabilities, so we just sat there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Finally, I asked, “Did they say how long I was going to be in here for?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looked away. “I dunno. I wasn’t paying attention. I was just worried. About if you were okay. And if you’d be okay with me. And stuff.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like, so many people are just fucking dicks about it. They give me shit for being me, and tell me I should just go back to being a fucking swamp rat, and tell me no one would ever want to date someone like me, and—“</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, I can tell you for a fact that shit isn’t true.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her breath hitched.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re pretty damn cool, and I know plenty of guys who’d date you in a heartbeat. You’re awesome, Lana.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looked away, blushing at the praise. Then she pushed herself to her feet, and said, “I should, um, go. I need to make more shells. And grenades. And I wanted to look at your armor. So that when you get back we can fix it. Together.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I gave her a happy grin. Tinkering with her sounded great. “I can’t wait.”</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
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